[HN Gopher] Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we ...
___________________________________________________________________
Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting
Author : bertman
Score : 427 points
Date : 2022-12-05 11:40 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ploum.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (ploum.net)
| causality0 wrote:
| Call me a cynic but I don't see how AI-generated drivel is any
| worse than human-typed bullshit.
| pixl97 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
| Retr0id wrote:
| It takes time for a human to type bullshit. AI can generate
| mountains of bullshit before a human author has got out of bed.
| otikik wrote:
| It's worse in the same way an atomic bomb is worse than
| dynamite. It's orders of magnitude faster and cheaper to
| generate.
| greenbit wrote:
| Frank Herbert was onto something with that line "Thou shalt not
| make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
| emj wrote:
| "Butlerian Jihad" that was the most surprising for me reading
| Dune that they had a limit on how smart computers could be. The
| movie was very vague on the subject, and was more of a Star
| Wars like lo-fi.
| jhbadger wrote:
| It was even more surprising if you realize that "Butlerian"
| is referring to the 19th century writer Samuel Butler
| (although, yes, Herbert later invented a character to explain
| the name in-universe). Samuel Butler wrote an 1863 essay
| "Darwin Among the Machines" which predicted that machines
| would improve in a way analogous to natural selection and
| would so so faster than humans could evolve, and therefore
| they might eventually surpass humanity.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| indeed, and selection pressure is not on the domain of
| physical bodies like for us fleshy species, but
| profitability for digital computational species in the
| domain of capital.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| This is a different kind of dystopia than I expected
| RHSman2 wrote:
| Best way to get ahead these days is actually not be in AI ;)
| jagaerglad wrote:
| Could you please elaborate why you think this, I'm currently
| changing paths of my education from AI oriented to Software
| development oriented
| shagie wrote:
| The quip / aphorism is a commentary on that a few years ago,
| AI was about being on the cutting edge - the things that were
| going to be seen _next year_.
|
| The work of AI researchers were about envisioning the future
| of what could be.
|
| Well, now what we've got is something that consumes
| everything and outputs aesthetically pleasing means of the
| content that it has consumed.
|
| However, that "consumes everything" means that its always
| reactive and working from data that is in the past.
|
| There is no creativity in it. This doesn't mean that it won't
| inspire a human, and it _does_ employ a lot of fancy tricks
| too (I 'm seriously impressed by its ability to create
| limericks of made up words with a coherent definition).
|
| However, the AI can never be "ahead" of the curve because it
| can only produce what it has consumed.
|
| This isn't to say a lot of the work that we do in software
| development isn't doing what has been done again and again
| and again (see also CRUD), but the moment you're given a
| novel problem or need to maintain an existing solution and
| encounter a new bug, the "can an AI do it" rapidly fails at
| those tasks as it lacks the domain knowledge necessary.
|
| -----
|
| Btw, I'm going to suggest giving Accelerando a read (
| https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
| static/fiction/acceler... ). It has an interesting take on
| it...
|
| > ... Anyway, Matrioshka brains, the end product of a
| technological singularity - they're bandwidth-limited. Sooner
| or later the posthuman descendants evolve Economics 2.0, or
| 3.0, or something else and it, uh, eats the original
| conscious instigators. Or uses them as currency or something.
| The end result we found is a howling wilderness of degenerate
| data, fractally compressed, postconscious processes running
| slower and slower as they trade storage space for processing
| power. ...
|
| (the part that reminded me of it is the GP post's comment...
| and the intro:
|
| > Manfred pauses in mid stride, narrowly avoids being mown
| down by a GPS-guided roller blader. This is getting weird
| enough to trip his weird-out meter, and that takes some
| doing. Manfred's whole life is lived on the bleeding edge of
| strangeness, fifteen minutes into everyone else's future, and
| he's normally in complete control - but at times like this he
| gets a frisson of fear, a sense that he might just have
| missed the correct turn on reality's approach road. "Uh, I'm
| not sure I got that. Let me get this straight, you claim to
| be some kind of AI, working for KGB dot RU, and you're afraid
| of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator
| semiotics?"
|
| )
|
| It takes an interesting path of the acceleration (note that I
| don't agree with the essence of the slope but instead believe
| we are seeing the product of a lot of sigmoid curves with the
| slope near a maximum - but as the easy stuff gets done, the
| (heh) second derivative gets negative as harder and harder
| problems need to be solved
| https://towardsdatascience.com/derivative-of-the-sigmoid-
| fun... ). We are seeing the seeds of ideas sown decades ago
| sprouting in rapid succession - and get to the maximum where
| things are neat and everyone is going "whee!" but the next
| step of maintaining that growth will take time and much more
| effort than sowing the ideas.
|
| Lots of people are working on the first half of the sigmoid
| curve... but people lose interest or resources when it comes
| to the second half and so you get a lot of things that are
| abandoned at or near where things started getting hard.
| neilv wrote:
| I've been known to start ranting when I'm searching on some topic
| that attracts SEO garbage (e.g., Python), and realize I'm in the
| nth different SEO garbage article search hit.
|
| I wonder whether a winning solution to the coming massively-
| parallel "AI" megaspew will emerge, how it will work, and whether
| Google will be the ones to do it.
|
| Or will the bulk of consumers overwhelmingly submit, and accept
| it as normal, much like we already do with huge regressions in
| the quality of interactions and thinking?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The solution is to create datasets that contain data and
| aesthetic judgment metadata from reputable sources together,
| and train models to perform aesthetic judgment. This will both
| filter out spam/low quality content, and provide a conditioning
| tool for generative models to improve their output. Even
| better, the arms race this will kick off will create a virtuous
| cycle that will push progress in AI.
|
| The only problem with aesthetic judgment models is that (much
| like human aesthetic judges) it will sometimes give poor scores
| to things that are dissimilar to the data it was trained on,
| even though many people might find those things aesthetically
| appealing.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >from reputable sources
|
| What does this even mean. Reputable sources tends to fail the
| 'chinese room' experiment because you can never tell if your
| source is reputable or just faking being reputable (or later
| becomes corrupted).
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Well, if we were talking about food, I'd say Gordon Ramsay,
| David Chang, Anthony Bourdain or The New York Times could
| be considered reputable, while a Yelp reviewer with a
| handful of reviews could be considered disreputable.
|
| Ultimately you can boil it down to: Trust sources when they
| make statements that are later observed by me to be true,
| or are trusted by other sources that I trust. The negative
| feedback loop boils down to: If a source made a statement
| that I later found to be untrue, or extended trust to an
| untrustworthy source, reduce that source's trust.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The issue here is you have pre-AI reputation sources, the
| problem is for post-AI content generation how are you
| supposed to find this content in a nearly infinite ocean
| of 'semi-garbage'. Anthony is not making new content, and
| one day the other people will expire. In the meantime a
| million 'semi-trustable' AI sources of content with
| varying reach depending on how they've been promoted will
| take over those markets.
|
| There are any number of particular problems here that we
| already know do not mesh well with how humans think.
| You'd start your AI source 'true', build up a following,
| and then slowly them into the Q-anon pit of insanity.
| Most people will follow your truth and fight anything
| that questions it.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Here's a solution:
|
| Go ask ChatGPT your question about python.
|
| It's spew is probably better than the SEO spew.
|
| I feel like species traitor taking the side of the AI, but I
| think this is probably a decent way of answering a lot of
| questions based on a factual and rational basis that have been
| answered multiple times. A lot of hoopla is made over the fact
| you can trick it with a false premise into giving a false
| answer (I'd note the false premise makes all answers true), but
| if it can simulate a Linux box reasonably well, it can answer
| your questions in python module imports better than sifting
| through page rank collections of SEO crap.
|
| Edit: I also think this doesn't undermine the value of stack
| overflow. Bots answering there probably does. But stack
| overflow has always struggled with simple redundant questions
| and trying to curate them away in favor of new and interesting
| questions, and promoting novel and well explained answers.
| ChatGPT probably won't do that for you. But it can load shed
| the redundant stuff highly effectively. And, over time, it'll
| get more nuanced as more nuanced questions and answers are
| incorporated. But the "I need human help" button is still there
| and thank goodness. Maybe the load shedding will enhance the
| experience on SO for everyone?
| visarga wrote:
| The solution will be to chain Google with chatGPT. A system
| that allows chatGPT to perform Google searches and use the
| retrieved documents as reference when formulating the
| response. This means we don't need to actually see Google or
| the website, but still have grounded responses with
| references.
|
| Instead of Google it could also be a big dump of text, like
| 1TB of well curated web text, so with local search you get
| more privacy and speed. And instead of chatGPT we will use
| "chatStability", a LM running on the local machine, in
| privacy. This could be the end of ads and the creation of a
| new private creative space for people.
|
| <rant>I think Google is in big trouble and that explains why
| they are second when it comes to LLMs - this line of
| development will make it easier to escape their ads and
| tracking. There's no profit in it for them.
|
| Even though the Transformer was invented at Google 5 years
| ago, from all the authors only one still works there, most of
| them have left to implement their own visions, a bunch of
| startups. Why have they left Google if they wanted to
| innovate? Because they could not do it inside. Google got to
| protect the current revenue streams first.</>
|
| https://analyticsindiamag.com/how-the-authors-behind-the-
| tra....
| moe091 wrote:
| Going off your point, even if we aren't quite there yet,
| there is no reason to suppose that AI won't eventually be
| massively better at basically ALL things than humans - that's
| certain the direction we're headed, and very quickly too.
|
| This is just the very beginning of the problem. It's time for
| people to start thinking about how to live in a world where
| they are "obsolete". All jobs, or, being conservative, at
| least the vast, vast majority will eventually be replaced by
| AI. AI will eventually be able to create art that is more
| appealing to humans than human-created art. I think there
| could eventually even be AI "people", who's company many
| people will prefer to other actual humans, as they will be
| designed/trained to be as perfect as possible for that task.
| I hope that most people will still see more value in genuine
| human interaction, as any person today probably would, but as
| tech evolves and we get used to it, let it into our lives
| more, let it control more of our lives and make more of our
| decisions, then it advances more and we get used to it more,
| etc. The idea of human connection and the separation between
| human life and AI "life" might not be as apparent to people
| as it is to us, and they may allow AI and technology to
| replace every facet of human existence
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I actually strongly disagree here with the conclusion you
| make. I think these are going to be tools that enhance the
| human mind. It'll enable the average person to be
| exceptional by using the AI as guidance. It'll enable the
| brilliant to exploit the AIs in novel and clever ways that
| were not possible before. The humans place is in the use of
| a tool, the tool doesn't replace the human.
|
| The challenge will be instead is there enough useful work
| to keep everyone paid in a post scarcity world? The advent
| of the useful AI will probably necessitate some very very
| serious thought about how we allocate and distribute
| capital.
|
| But I don't believe artists will be replaced by an AI any
| more than they were by the camera. Or that streaming will
| kill music. Etc.
| nradov wrote:
| Search engines like Google are probably a dying technology. The
| next disruptive innovation in that space will be "answer
| engines" that use GPT like technology to dynamically generate
| specific answers to questions rather than linking users to
| third-party sites. This will allow for controlling the entire
| user experience and serving ads embedded in the generated
| content.
| visarga wrote:
| I don't think there will be ads. We'll be able to run a local
| chatBot just like we run SD.
| angelbar wrote:
| As https://www.wolframalpha.com/
| pmontra wrote:
| I almost decided to limit my searches to the search engines of
| the authoritative sites. Examples in the case of Python: the
| Python language, the Django framework, Stackoverflow (until it
| will surrender to AI posts then we see what happens.) I'll end
| up creating a home page with search boxes to those sites. Very
| '90s
| welterde wrote:
| You could also put something like searx [1] in front to
| search all at once (or at least provide unified interface for
| all).
|
| [1] https://searx.github.io/searx/
| wjholden wrote:
| Your post led me to an interesting little quick experiment.
|
| So in 2020 I self-taught Python during Advent of Code. I
| remember remarking that official python.org results seldom
| made it to the top of Google searches. I was used to Java and
| Julia searches taking me right to the official sites.
|
| Anyways, so an experiment just search for "[language]
| [feature]". I ended up with W3Schools as my top result for
| "Java ArrayList", but Oracle JDK8 docs for "Java Socket".
| "Python Socket" takes me to language reference but "Golang
| Socket" does not.
|
| Maybe there's a trend to be discovered.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Ironically, the 90s solution (human-curated link collections)
| to Internet-wide searches seems the easiest way out.
|
| It's relatively easy for a human to tell the difference
| between AI copy (as pollutes the web) and actual content.
|
| It's also strange that Google et al. haven't built human-in-
| the-loop flagging of spam content into their search UX ("Is
| this site low quality?"). They could get around flag spam via
| reputation, given that Google knows identity for most of its
| users (because they're logged in or via IP across their
| properties).
|
| Side note: In cursory research on current state, I came
| across the Chinese phrase "human flesh search engine" [0],
| which I wonder if it sounds as cyberpunk in the original
| Chinese.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flesh_search_engine
| concordDance wrote:
| > It's relatively easy for a human to tell the difference
| between AI copy (as pollutes the web) and actual content.
|
| It is now. It definitely won't be when gpt gets popular.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It will be: GPT output is _usually_ either garbage,
| repetitive, very wrong, subtly wrong, or inconsistent in
| writing style in a way humans aren 't. (It sort of starts
| trying to say something different, in the "same style" as
| it started with, then switches style _later_.)
|
| When humans really can't tell the difference, well...
| https://xkcd.com/810/ seems appropriate.
| concordDance wrote:
| The GPT output I've been making using openAI's chatpot is
| indistinguishable from what the bottom 70% of
| commentators put out.
|
| But an environment glutted with that content is also
| worthless. I read for the top 10% that has genuinely
| novel thoughts.
| bitL wrote:
| Without revealing the origin, the latest models tested in
| private betas solve many of the points you mentioned.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| This is why I'm not leaking _all_ my discriminating
| heuristics.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law strikes
| again.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| At some point you also run up against the virus vs immune
| system endgame: it's evolutionarily inefficient to
| optimally outwit an adversarial system.
|
| Usually there exists a local maximum where you obtain
| most of the value with less-than-full effort.
|
| Sadly, the centralization of search directly cuts against
| that. I.e. outwitting Google search = $$$$ vs outwitting
| 1-or-4 equally-used search engines = $. :(
| vsareto wrote:
| https://i.imgur.com/kBGRUqL.jpg
| xdennis wrote:
| In most cases, judging if something was created by GPT
| takes quite a long while. It's not a search result you
| can easily dismiss.
| fmajid wrote:
| > It's relatively easy for a human to tell the difference
| between AI copy (as pollutes the web) and actual content.
|
| No:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The Sokal affair says more about the dynamics of academic
| publishing than it does about humans' ability to key to
| nuances.
|
| And "as pollutes the web" -> we're not talking about
| state of the art.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| We're already drowning in human generated garbage on the web.
| Sure, AI makes it worse, but we can't blame anything but our
| human compatriots and ourselves.
| nottorp wrote:
| From what quotes i've seen posted about this ChatGPT it's a
| more readable version of the manually done SEO spam pages.
|
| I might have to check that paid search engine...
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| When you think about it, since most of that "human generated
| garbage" is mainly trying to appease recommendation algorithms,
| which are mostly AI these days, even the human generated
| garbage is actually AI generated garbage by proxy.
|
| We can't kill the machine, but we can starve it. None of this
| would exist without advertising. If we kill advertising we kill
| the content farms. And nothing of value will be lost.
| boringg wrote:
| But everybody has an important viewpoint that they need to
| spread themselves and that you haven't or someone else hasn't
| already elucidated /s.
| jagaerglad wrote:
| All this ChatGPT hysteria led me to have the following
| conversation with it. Probably hit some near future nail on its
| head. "Hello AI, please do today's tasks", the programmer will be
| on the level of the call center operator of today in terms of
| skills
|
| * Human: Explain to me the phenomenon of post-ChatGPT depression
| seen in a software developer
|
| * ChatGPT: [...] After using the ChatGPT tool, some developers
| may experience feelings of depression, sadness, and loss. This
| may be due to the realization that their job as a developer has
| been reduced to using a tool that can be easily replicated by
| others, leading to a feeling of redundancy and lack of
| fulfillment in their work.
|
| Additionally, the use of ChatGPT may also lead to a loss of
| creativity and problem-solving skills, as the tool takes care of
| the majority of the coding process. This can cause developers to
| feel like they are no longer contributing to their team or making
| a meaningful impact in their field.
|
| In short, post-ChatGPT depression is a psychological reaction to
| the use of a tool that simplifies the coding process, leading to
| feelings of redundancy, lack of fulfillment, and loss of
| creativity in software developers.
| lezojeda wrote:
| What does this have to do with the article?
| dragontamer wrote:
| We can start expecting this kind of garbage to start
| polluting our discussion spaces.
| jagaerglad wrote:
| Well for one, it is AI generated garbage in the comments of
| an otherwise well curated website, HN. That's too meta
| perhaps. I just wanted to share my feelings out loud of this
| whole showdown, thinking other might feel the same and share
| what they think.
|
| The bot replied with feelings of being replaced, but feelings
| of eternal september2, eternal 2023, are equally valid signs
| of this hypothetical post-ChatGPT depression, probably in a
| closer distance in the future than the former, and besides,
| more relevant to the article, not just the subject as a whole
| [deleted]
| vvvvvsvvs wrote:
| Friendly reminder that the ending of the video game Metal Gear
| Solid 2 predicted this way back in 2001
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKl6WjfDqYA&t=20s
| dsign wrote:
| As others have pointed out, AI's are not needed to produce crappy
| repetition which is eagerly gobbled by the masses, i.e.
| Hollywood, Netflix, and werewolves and vampire stories by the
| penny. And there is a huge audience for those.
|
| What I think is going to happen is that even when I'm searching
| for information in subject X, I might need to fight through a lot
| of AI fluff to get anywhere. If that gets too bad, I may loose
| the incentive to use the Internet altogether, or to use the open
| internet. If I can't use the open Internet, I'll have to go to
| the closed one, which by definition is under the control of
| funded parties.
|
| Today, we have a semblance of "verifiable personhood". Imagine
| what will happen when we use AI to break that too. For example,
| an AI could create a fictitious "Derek Mains" who post photos to
| Instagram, has a Facebook account with photos from his childhood
| all the way to his retirement, a profile in LinkedIn with a lot
| of professional connections (AI fictions like him but also many
| real people that the AI gulled), and even a Github repository
| from the time he tries to create a cooking recipes website, full
| of PHP and Python code. Derek Mains is now traveling the world
| and tasting new types of food, posting regular updates on
| Twitter/Tumblr/Mastodon, _and_ Wikipedia, where he edits food-
| related articles. Not very often compared with everything he does
| online, but once in a while he engages with other people(?) in
| Twitter where he is partial to party X.
|
| What would real people do when they discover that the Internet is
| full of "Derek Mains"? How do governments and power factions will
| use this? Wouldn't be sweet to own the closed Internet when the
| open one is a wasteland?
| pixl97 wrote:
| >AI's are not needed to produce crappy repetition which is
| eagerly gobbled by the masses
|
| True, but humans that create this kind of crap still have to
| sleep, eat, and generally not pay attention to feeding the
| machine. meanwhile the AI terminator is out there, it can't be
| bargained with, it can't be reasoned with, it doesn't feel pity
| or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop... EVER,
| until you are _buried in an ocean of garbage content_.
| watmough wrote:
| Sadly the killer app of Facebook is to meet and enable precisely
| the kinds of local community the author is suggesting.
|
| In a sense, Marketplace is the new Facebook. A buddy is just
| swinging by with some Rx-7 TII brakes for my NA. We have been
| trading parts for the last couple years.
|
| I was at a car show yesterday, who did I know, Facebook buds.
| tetraca wrote:
| Upload your fake text and images anywhere. Upload it everywhere.
| Upload it as yourself. Upload it on behest of your willing
| friends. Corrupt your face in dozens of ways, then tag each as
| yourself. When everything is garbage, shadow profiles will mean
| nothing, social credit scores will mean nothing, analytics will
| mean nothing. Centralization can be turned on its head - the
| watering hole will be revealed to be the dangerous cesspit it is.
| Create art until what can be monetized has no value. Create news
| that never happened, scoops that are only a distant fiction,
| until nothing on the internet can even be meaningfully reported
| on. The corrosive powers of mass memetics for the first time can
| be rendered entirely impotent.
| drdaeman wrote:
| While I honestly do want to support this approach because
| unlike the alternative it might (just "might", though) work, I
| regretfully must also admit that the huge problem with this is
| collateral damage. There are millions of humans out there that
| are either highly susceptible to or are already caught into
| believing all sorts of nonsense, getting scammed in all forms,
| costing them money, time, well-being and even lives. The issue
| with fake flood is that until the saturation/breaking point
| (when the understanding that existing trust system is fatally
| broken becomes truly mainstream) it's going to make this
| situation worse.
|
| What's extremely frustrating is that the _only_ alternative I
| 've ever seen proposed are forms of a never-ending moderation
| arms race, some variant of a "war on fakes". Which is even
| scarier in the long run, because while it mitigates the damages
| here and now (good), it would never solve the underlying
| problem, and only further cement some parts of it (enforced
| trust invites potential abuse).
|
| And as usual, humanity is currently stuck between two
| incredibly shitty options (traditionally going through a path
| of least resistance, no matter what could be at the end of it -
| because that's how large systems work), hopefully still
| searching for a magical third silver bullet.
| tetraca wrote:
| > There are millions of humans out there that are either
| highly susceptible to or are already caught into believing
| all sorts of nonsense, getting scammed in all forms, costing
| them money, time, well-being and even lives. The issue with
| fake flood is that until the saturation/breaking point (when
| the understanding that existing trust system is fatally
| broken becomes truly mainstream) it's going to make this
| situation worse.
|
| The people who are willing to engage in charlatanism and mass
| manipulation are already enabled by this tooling and will use
| AI as a force multiplier whether we use it to jam the signal
| or not, and the results will be far, far worse for victims
| because these people will actually have directed, dangerous
| goals and agendas to push them toward rather than having them
| flail in a contradictory trash pile.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| It's only a problem that large numbers are easily duped no
| matter how much education we give them when it's also coupled
| with no-questions-asked universal suffrage.
| kashunstva wrote:
| It depends in part on the quality of what is passed off as
| education. After twelve years of US public education in the
| 1970's and 80's, not once did critical thinking tools,
| types and sources of bias, and default-mode skepticism come
| up. I'd rather work on improving that, rather than making
| it even harder for citizens to vote.
| moe091 wrote:
| I agree with your point, but also think this trajectory is
| kind of inevitable in a way. As we can already see, a LOT of
| people are living deep in a world of BS news stories and made
| up facts, to the point where they're basically in a different
| reality.
|
| Ideally, we'd find a way to go backwards from where we are
| now, maybe future generations will grow up with this flood of
| false info and learn to navigate it, but I think we reached a
| point where tech is developing so fast, and the world is
| changing so fast, that there were always be a large number of
| people who can't "keep up".
|
| Given that, this may be one of the few scenarios where I'm in
| favor of a kind of "accelerationism" - increase the problem
| to a breaking point as soon as possible so that we can deal
| with the fallout and recover from it now, rather than dealing
| with this horrible state of things for decades and decades as
| it slowly gets worse and worse, until we eventually reach a
| breaking point anyway and likely have an even worse fallout
| to recover from.
| rcarr wrote:
| If it leads to total chaos (which I think it's going to) I
| could easily see governments trying to enact the following:
|
| - A public blockchain or database for ID purposes, with every
| ID traceable back to a real human. Legislation created that
| mandates all websites implementing user profiles for any
| social purpose to require an official ID on signup and every
| user must be identifiable on the platform by their real name.
|
| - Access to AI only under strict restrictions. Official apps
| you're allowed to use with the government banning all others.
| Big Tech will happily comply with the censoring because they
| are the designated official AI app providers.
|
| - Photorealistic AI and Video banned entirely because the
| potential to incite violence through fake videos is too high.
| Imagine Pizzagate or Jan 6th but someone made a Blair Witch
| style video showing Biden and Pelosi killing a baby as
| members of a secret cult. Or someone made a video of one of
| their enemies committing animal abuse and sending it to
| everyone in the town.
|
| - Exams will make up the entirety of your grade in most
| educational environments apart from those where AI cannot be
| used for creating the coursework.
|
| - Anyone caught using non-official AI or abusing AI will be
| subject to harsh prison time akin to hacking state secrets.
|
| Of course, the government and its agencies will have access
| to all of this technology for their own purposes so they will
| be able to create whatever they want to control you, your
| thoughts and society's perception to be whatever they want it
| to be. As this isn't really preferable to the complete chaos
| it's trying to control, more and more people will try to
| disconnect from the internet as much as possible. The IRL
| economy will grow and there will be a resurgence in analogue
| forms of media for counter culture types. There may even be a
| resurgence of interest in blue collar trade jobs if white
| collar jobs are decimated and wages plummet.
|
| We are on the precipice of 1984.
| nine_k wrote:
| This reminds me of the great novel _Fiasco_ by Stanislaw Lem
| [1].
|
| The civilization described in the novel fills the entire radio
| spectrum with noise, to make efficient communication impossible
| (and possibly to also allow highly sophisticated noise-like
| encrypted communication be undetectable).
|
| Their society is pretty dystopian though.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(novel)
| warpech wrote:
| Also the book _The Cyberiad_ by Lem is now more relevant than
| ever. It is a set of short stories, mostly about messing with
| generative AI, AI assistants, etc.
| rikroots wrote:
| We didn't need the help of AI to do this to poetry already. It
| turns out that access to a text editor was more than
| sufficient.
| naveen99 wrote:
| Now you see why tribes form by evolution just as mutation does.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| I'd be careful. By doing this you can use the date these AIs
| became readily available as a tool for bisecting between
| "legitimate profiles" before the year X and "potentially fake"
| profiles from after the year X, which can then be used to very
| effectively train an AI to tell the difference...
| rrobukef wrote:
| Sure, it also mean limiting the dataset of our children (i.e.
| the bane of ML), it means bit-rot for existing datasets.
| moe091 wrote:
| I was going to say this is a great idea but totally unfeasible
| due to the amount of cooperation required, enough people simply
| won't do it, but parts of it are kind of happening by default.
| e.g. with BS news stories and whatnot. Also I suppose a lot of
| it could be automated - fighting fire with fire in a way. I'm
| sure that would lead to a cat-and-mouse game of creating code
| for detecting and ignoring intentionally obfuscating content,
| then the other side coding their way around those detection
| systems, and then back and forth like that forever, similar to
| the pattern of: finding exploit -> patching exploit -> finding
| new exploit -> patching new exploit -> etc.
| friesandties wrote:
| > Create art until what can be monetized has no value.
|
| A1.
| poszlem wrote:
| While the current speed of the AI research makes me quite uneasy,
| I cannot really dismiss what we are seeing as:
|
| >What we are witnessing is thus not "artificial creativity" but a
| simple "statistical mean of everything uploaded by humans on the
| internet which fits certain criteria".
|
| at least not more than I would my own brain.
|
| I don however fully expect a strong luddite-like backlash
| happening when this is going to be deployed to more and more
| places. (Which is not to say that everyone opposed to it is a
| luddite, but there is a very strong impulse, I have it to, to see
| this technology as a threat).
| api wrote:
| It wouldn't be a threat if we didn't have an economy that
| distributed most gains to the very top. If things were more
| equitable it would mean we will all become much wealthier due
| to a large productivity increase.
|
| I almost never see that raised in these discussions. We have
| been so conditioned not to think about this subject.
|
| We can blame the tech, each other, everything but the system.
| pigsty wrote:
| It's weird how readily so many people will dismiss AI art as
| just being a product of its input, when that's really all
| humans are as well. All artists (myself included) are just the
| ongoing product of various inspirations (inputs). Dali is a
| world-renowned artist, but his art wasn't born in a bubble and
| ripped from the void. He studied and referenced artists before
| him, then changed it. Artists who saw his work later
| incorporated elements he used.
|
| My big worry from here though is what'll happen when we take
| the next step: bundling these AIs together and start making a
| comprehensive AI. We have AIs that can respond to comments to
| some extent now, we can generate realistic selfies, and they
| can make art based off prompts that they could be designed to
| feed to themselves--set that loose on Twitter and you have a
| completely automated and convincingly living artist out there.
| Next step after is using AI to handle free movement by auto-
| adjusting balance and then performing convincing human speech.
| The future is getting freaky and fast.
| tartoran wrote:
| But at least artists have some agency, all that stuff that
| they ingested goes through them and are somewhat limited by
| human hardware. Very little is original indeed but that
| percentage may as well go down even more as more and more AI
| generated soup unleashed on the world.
| jhbadger wrote:
| What about artists that used random generators in their
| art? Jackson Pollock used to randomly splatter paint on
| canvases and when some random pattern struck his fancy he
| went with it. That's not all that different from picking
| the pictures you like from a Stable Diffusion prompt and
| then further honing them with inpainting, image-to-image
| and so on.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| Only boring humans are just the product of the content they
| consume; interesting people have concerns about relationships
| with other humans, organisations, resources, threats and
| opportunities that come from being an entity living in a
| world full of things they don't control and things they'd
| quite like to control. It's also fairly easy to identify
| artists who have done nothing but look at other art.
|
| Hayao Miyazaki once said "Almost all Japanese animation is
| produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real
| people, you know. It's produced by humans who can't stand
| looking at other humans. And that's why the industry is full
| of otaku!" While I'm not actually a huge fan of his work,
| it's easy to see where he's coming from when you see the
| likes of "In Another World with My Smartphone" or the
| hundreds of other trash light novel adaptations. They're
| clearly fiction being produced by people whose lives are
| nothing but consuming other fiction, and all they can do is
| reference that. They have nothing to say.
|
| For another example, there's a huge number of 20th century
| war films. They weren't made because their creators had read
| a lot of Wikipedia articles about how destructive wars were
| becoming. The likes of Platoon are a product of mortal
| fleshbags who actually saw combat and genuinely feared for
| their lives. Dr. Strangelove was created by people who had a
| genuine belief that they were at risk of being annihilated in
| a nuclear fireball.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This is a tricky distinction where this may be true of all
| specific individual humans, but not of humanity. At some
| point, language and art didn't exist, and humanity invented
| those things. We didn't mimic some other civilization that
| did it first.
|
| I don't know that this distinction matters, but it is real.
| Even on an individual level, if you raise a child in complete
| isolation from history and teach them no language or art,
| they'll still form thoughts, have feelings, and develop means
| by which to communicate those.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| > when that's really all humans are
|
| There's a fair bit of truth in this but it remains a nearly
| useless oversimplification. We can't adequately isolate or
| even identify all the inputs into what makes a person what
| they are, or produce what they do. The idea that this is even
| possible is rejected by a large proportion of the world
| population, and for now at least we can't prove them wrong.
|
| > All artists (myself included) are just the ongoing product
| of various inspirations (inputs)
|
| This ignores that inspiration is itself an active and
| creative process. There's not a one to one mapping between a
| piece of art and the effect it has on a person who receives
| it. Even hating an art is a process of influence in a very
| real way that I don't know there's an AI analog of. These
| systems can not include a source in their output, but can
| they decide to include its opposite? What is the opposite of
| a tree, btw? A desert, an ocean, a seed? A value judgement
| based on culture and aesthetics and opinion and worldview
| that ML software has no standpoint from which to make.
|
| I'm not trying to make a moral case for or against this
| technology right now. But I think trying to understand and
| evaluate it in human terms like this is a mistake. It's
| something else, and we're still trying to figure out what
| terms _are_ appropriate to understand it, hence the
| difficulty. It 's important to honestly engage with that
| alienness and uncertainty right now.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I've been saying this for years and for some reason no one seems
| to take it seriously: we're heading towards an era where it's
| going to be incredibly difficult to differentiate real and fake
| information. It's not going to be wholly fake or auto-generated
| content either. It'll be taking something that is real and
| modifying it to make it false where you have a hard time telling
| which one is real.
|
| Interestingly, this issue came up in the book Anathem that had
| bots basically creating fake information and then selling you a
| solution to filter it out.
| sgt101 wrote:
| I hit a great example; got my Tesla to the garage and they asked
| me to put it jack mode.
|
| I couldn't find it, Google's first result said categorically that
| the Model 3 required a jack mode... I realised that it was auto
| generated junk and searched through a few pages and found
| something solid that showed me that it didn't.
| Sevii wrote:
| This article ignores the pruning that is happening. A human
| evaluated every output from ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion for
| 'things humans care about' and if it didn't make the cut deleted
| it. All the spam output from these models is deleted immediately.
| epaulson wrote:
| I think this is spot-on. The models are trained from what they
| find on the Internet, as more of the Internet becomes AI-
| generated, the AI-generated content comes to dominate the
| training data for future AI models and we get stuck.
|
| It's like Kessler Syndrome but instead of space debris, it's AI-
| generated content that makes the Internet useless for training
| data.
| keiferski wrote:
| People really love to make predictions about technologies way too
| early. It's been a year or two, tops, since this stuff has gone
| mainstream. I very much doubt that the consumer ecosystem will
| remain the same while content undergoes an AI-powered paradigm
| shift. We will most likely see a growth of curated sites that
| help weed out the nonsense, as has been typical for most new
| developments.
|
| And on that note, I think the framing here is just wrong from the
| start. These new tools are _awesome_ if you're a creator.
| Complaining about the consumer-facing side of this new tech is a
| bit like complaining that cheaper video cameras will lead to junk
| films everywhere. Yeah, that happened, but who cares? It also
| allowed creative people to make stuff without needing a huge
| budget.
| baandam wrote:
| I we have already seen this play out in music though.
|
| Computers let anyone record music when it use to cost thousands
| of dollars to record music.
|
| The results have been a disaster outside the top 1% of music
| makers. Such a dramatic change that anyone under 30 doesn't
| even know what has been lost at this point. Music as a whole is
| laughably less creative as "popular" / pop music established
| total dominance. The money all flows upward that use to be much
| more dispersed.
| keiferski wrote:
| I don't think that's true at all. There are a ton of niche
| music makers and a ton of ways to find them...infinitely more
| than there were a few decades ago. You just have to go
| looking for them. Which frankly isn't even that difficult
| with YouTube and SoundCloud. Maybe the musicians aren't
| making millions, but the creativity is definitely there.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Sorry but no, this is completely the wrong take. Popular
| music is less diverse today for the same reason that half the
| movies released now are Marvel - art is more commoditized,
| and businesses are more data driven, with the shift towards
| more public companies also playing a role, as they can't take
| as many risks as private companies.
|
| What cheap music production tools have done is allow niche
| subcultures to create music that actually sounds good. Punk,
| metal and early hip hop all grew from people sharing rare
| tapes that were poorly produced and sounded like shit, but
| were a breath of creative fresh air. Now people's unusual
| creative divergences are stream-able and have production
| quality close to that of stuff on major labels.
| pixl97 wrote:
| This seems like a failure in statistics.
|
| Lets say in 1 year 10 songs are created and 2 of them are
| 'creative'. You'd think that 20% of music is creative.
|
| Now lets say we have the production explosion and now in 1
| year 100 songs are created and 4 of them are creative. You
| would think creativity has fallen off a cliff when it has
| really doubled.
|
| In addition trying to compare with the previous payola ridden
| system were winners and losers systematically chosen by a
| wealthy cabal seems rather asinine. It only worked because
| there was a limited number of radio stations mostly. Even if
| production costs stayed high, distribution costs dropping
| would have changed the model dramatically anyway.
| rcarr wrote:
| I used to feel the same way but I eventually came to realise
| that there's tons of good music being created, it's the
| social aspect of music that has been destroyed.
|
| Individual algorithm recommendations have subsumed sub
| cultures. Music used to be part of both your individual and
| group identity, it would influence what your wore, what you
| read, what you thought, who you hanged out with and what bars
| you visited. Technology has eroded the music press and sky
| high rents and fitness culture (not as many people drinking)
| means lots of gig venues and bars have closed down. These
| were the glue that built the subcultures up. You used to have
| the mainstream plus a few sub cultures that would evolve each
| decade e.g mods, rockers, hippies, metal heads, punks, new
| wave, hair metal, brit pop, emos, indie rockers etc. All of
| these ended up getting absorbed into the long tail so you now
| have the main stream and then everything else, with nothing
| in the everything else category really able to attract enough
| people to it in order to form era defining subculture like
| the days of old.
|
| Combined with the sheer amount of music being created, all of
| this makes it harder to find music you actually want to hear.
| Your friends are all listening to different stuff so you
| don't get many good in person recommendations anymore and
| what's left of the music media are struggling to stay afloat
| and resorting to all kinds of stuff like NME doing movie
| reviews. The algorithms are hit and miss and search engines
| are getting worse and worse. So you become more and more at
| the mercy of chance, hoping that somewhere you stumble upon a
| review or a blog post, a subreddit or a song that somehow
| leads you to some good new music. But the reward to effort
| ratio often makes it harder to justify the time investment.
| And however good the music is, it's not as enjoyable when you
| don't have a group of people to share it with.
| rcarr wrote:
| Coincidentally, just came across this which is a nice take:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/dec/05/has-spotify-
| re...
| marstall wrote:
| > These new tools are awesome if you're a creator.
|
| you're typing "generate me an article about x" into gpt-3.
| who's the creator here?
| keiferski wrote:
| I don't exactly understand your question, but I'm assuming
| you mean something like, "What value is this person actually
| creating?"
|
| I can think of two direct use cases where I would find it
| helpful:
|
| - Creating a "precis" (concept from Neuromancer) video or
| article on a particular topic. For example, let's say I want
| to learn about pre-20th century Indonesian art. Sure, I could
| Google and read some articles, but it would be vastly more
| enjoyable and efficient to just get a 5-minute video auto-
| generated on the topic.
|
| - For creating content that I want to read but don't
| necessarily have the time to write. I'd love to create a
| website that catalogs subcultures, for example, but I just
| don't have the time to do the research and writing myself.
|
| Both of these are dependent on the generated content being
| accurate, of course, but that seems like a temporary problem,
| not a flaw in the system itself.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I think the nearby comment that points out that this is
| more closely related to editing than to creation as it has
| recently been understood is correct. Which is not a value
| judgement per se, but the distinction between those two
| activities is useful and to me provides a useful lens to
| understand this change.
| keiferski wrote:
| On the face of it, that is true. But on a deeper level,
| AI generation is really just a kind of rapid sketching,
| and sketching is a practice that goes back millennia.
|
| Additionally, it depends on how you are defining
| "creation" and there have been various artistic movements
| which "created" art in a manner not dissimilar to AI
| image generators. The _cut-up technique_ or some
| Dadaists, for example. I certainly would consider works
| by Burroughs or Tzara to be real creations and not simply
| editing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| You're conflating two meanings of sketching though.
| Artists and others do uses it as an exploratory tool, and
| I've already seen AI generation used in a similar way so
| I know that's a valid application of it.
|
| But at a lower level sketching is itself a visual
| interpretive and creative process. And yes what we're
| talking about _is_ mechanically similar to the cut-up
| technique, but is that used for "sketching" in the
| exploratory sense?
|
| I don't know, maybe. My point overall is that these tools
| aren't "really just" anything. They have similarities and
| similar applications to many things we've seen and done,
| yes. But they are fundamentally alien and in important
| ways _are_ unlike anything else we 've done. We should be
| careful about and aware of the limitations we put on our
| understanding when we try to interpret them through the
| lens of what has come before. To some extent we have no
| other lens, but that doesn't lessen the limitation.
|
| I think in this case the _role_ of the human in the
| process does have a strong analog to that of an editor.
| Where you have the ability to initiate and then shape the
| creation of another entity, but the creation itself is
| out of your hands. It 's not exact, but it may be close
| enough to be useful, in a way I think comparing it to the
| cut-up technique is not quite.
| visarga wrote:
| I think of this as being a manager. Like having a team
| reporting to you, and you have to assign tasks, follow
| up, give advice.
| 2devnull wrote:
| Why would anybody need to type anything? Gpt will type the
| gpt prompts. AI will create the AI that will create the AI.
| There will be people involved but increasingly less.
| visarga wrote:
| We need an AI that writes AI papers, and one that
| implements AI papers. They could be both chatGPT. Then just
| let them run in a huge datacenter for a year.
| cardanome wrote:
| Your are.
|
| Are you the author of the binary your compiler made? Sure you
| are. Of think of using blender geometry nodes to generate and
| render pictures of architecture. Nobody would think that
| traditional computer generated images are not made by humans.
|
| The is no intelligence in gpt-3. It's just called "AI" for
| marketing reasons. It's an data driven algorithm.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I'd argue that the creator went from being an author to
| being an editor, and that is fine.
|
| Personally, I am enjoying chatgpt and copilot. They both
| have saved me a lot of time when dealing with new tech and
| accumulating new information.
|
| I don't trust them for certain highly sensitive or
| technical issues, but other than that if I can minimise the
| time I spend working without a reduction in productivity,
| well, I am all for it.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Except that isn't the creative loop people are talking about.
| The creative loop is having an outline for what you want to
| communicate, and feeding parts of the outline into the model,
| running it a few times and cherry picking the best results,
| then stitching them together to create a cohesive whole in
| less time than it would have taken to create it from scratch
| (and with a higher quality final output).
| sorokod wrote:
| _Yeah, that happened, but who cares? It also allowed creative
| people to make stuff without needing a huge budget_
|
| Is it not too early to make predictions?
| ergonaught wrote:
| Your quote isn't a prediction, but a direct observation of
| what occurred.
| sorokod wrote:
| You are drawing a parallel implying that in the future one
| will behave like the other - close enough.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| How about this:
|
| People really love to make predictions about technologies
| way too early. It's been a year or two, tops, since this
| stuff has gone mainstream.
|
| Prediction: I very much doubt that the consumer ecosystem
| will remain the same while content undergoes an AI-powered
| paradigm shift. We will most likely see a growth of curated
| sites that help weed out the nonsense, as has been typical
| for most new developments.
| keiferski wrote:
| Filmmaking devices have gotten cheaper consistently over the
| last ~50 years. I don't know about you, but I think some
| pretty good movies have come out since 1970, especially by
| directors working on very low budgets.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _I don't know about you, but I think some pretty good
| movies have come out since 1970, especially by directors
| working on very low budgets._
|
| On the whole, I think the average quality of cinematography
| in theater or wide-streaming releases has decreased.
|
| Which isn't disagreement with your point, as I think it
| says more about audience tastes and gatekeeping filters
| than technology.
|
| When film equipment was expensive and the bare minimum for
| creating a film was high, studios had a much tighter filter
| on who they'd fund to create a film. Consequently, the
| level of craft was higher.
| tpxl wrote:
| What needs to be said here is that average quality is
| more or less irrelevant. If the amount of high quality
| movies increases (it did) and the discoverability doesn't
| suffer (it didn't too much), then that's a plus.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I'd argue discoverability is a currently unsolved
| problem. Or maybe "uncared about" (optimizing engagement
| >> enjoyment).
|
| At least when I'm getting far better recommendations from
| HN than any front-page algorithm I've seen.
| [deleted]
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The thing that has tanked the quality of theatrical films
| on average isn't improved technology, it's the increasing
| commodification of art, risk aversion of business and the
| modern reliance on data to drive business decisions.
| That's why we have basically nothing but sequels, reboots
| and formulaic drivel coming out of the major studios.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| And also hindsight filters. No one remembers the crap
| movies from 1982. We remember the best-of-80s.
|
| So we're comparing {recent movies} to {decades of best
| movies}.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| "It's too early to make predictions. Here's my prediction"
|
| ^^^ I think this is what the response meant. I noticed it
| too, you castigated folks for making predictions then led
| into your own :-) a real AI wouldn't do that!
| thfuran wrote:
| I don't think the making of the original blade runner
| involved much in the way of modern AI. I'm honestly not
| sure what you're trying to say.
| keiferski wrote:
| AI creation tools make it easier to make stuff. This
| process will result in a lot of junk, but it will also
| result in some super creative people making art they
| otherwise couldn't.
|
| The same process happened with filmmaking. Fifty or sixty
| years ago, it was too expensive for anyone other than
| large corporations.
|
| You could even say the same thing for writing itself; a
| thousand years ago, paper was too expensive for the
| average person and most people couldn't afford to buy
| books and become literate. Today, writing paper is
| functionally free.
| adql wrote:
| And it's not just creation of art from "scratch", I bet
| we will soon see AI being able to take painted animation
| frame, sketch of next and extrapolate next frame from it,
| and making whole process so much cheaper
| fmajid wrote:
| An Avid nonlinear video editing station used to cost
| $100K. Nowadays you can do the same with software costing
| $300 on the computer you already have. You can get a
| mirrorless video camera that blows away the Sony CineAlta
| ones George Lucas used to shoot the Star Wars prequels
| for under a grand. This has removed a huge chunk of
| production costs and make indie film-making much more
| viable. The only limits are your imagination and the
| salaries of the actors and camera crew.
|
| AI-generated animation is already being used by industry
| giants like Toei, and will likely be the first
| application to hit the screens.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| The problem is, Google isn't very curated. All the AI-generated
| SEO spam is going to pollute its indexes.
| visarga wrote:
| > Algorithms are able to create out of nowhere this very engaging
| content. That's exactly why you are finding the results
| fascinating. Those are pictures and text that have the maximal
| probability of fascinating us. They are designed that way.
|
| Conditional generative models are not the same as Facebook's feed
| ranking models, which are optimized for engagement. Instead,
| generative models are fine-tuned to solve many tasks, expecting
| correct answers when asked for. For example, when you ask for a
| cat, you expect a cat, and when you ask for a Python snippet, you
| expect it to do exactly what you said.
| fedeb95 wrote:
| This is a problem only if you can't think critically. In that
| case, there's a problem AI or not AI.
| jl6 wrote:
| It's clear that we are currently dealing with a deluge of AI
| generated content that is overwhelming our ability to process and
| make sense of it all. This has led to a situation where we are
| essentially drowning in a sea of noise, making it increasingly
| difficult to separate the signal from the noise. This is a
| problem that we need to address, not just for our own sanity, but
| for the future of AI itself. If we continue to allow AI generated
| garbage to flood our feeds and clog up our systems, it will only
| serve to undermine the credibility and usefulness of AI in the
| long run. We need to take steps to better filter and manage this
| content, and to ensure that we are only consuming high-quality,
| useful information. This is a war that we are fighting, and we
| need to be prepared to do whatever it takes to win it.
|
| -----
|
| Edit: the above was the output of ChatGPT, given the following
| prompt:
|
| Write a Hacker News comment on the subject of "Drowning in AI
| Generated Garbage : the silent war we are fighting"
| vinyl7 wrote:
| I see a future of the internet, and we're already 80% of the way
| there, where everything in the internet is fake generated and
| pretty much useless spam. It'll get to the point where going on
| the internet would be the equivalent of trying to find something
| useful in a trash dump, and it'll not even be worth the effort.
| chubot wrote:
| Does this sound old-fashioned? Read more books and less Internet.
|
| There is a lot of information in books that is not on the
| Internet, yet many people don't seem to realize it. I notice a
| lot of people seem to get almost all of their information from
| the Internet. Over time, I think that will make you stupid.
|
| (The neutering of google books was a setback, but perhaps
| paradoxically good -- it preserved a unique value of books)
|
| There are also a lot of fluffy books published in the last 20 or
| so years - roughly equivalent to content farms - which is why
| older books that have stood the test of time are a good bet.
| seydor wrote:
| Don't they use all the out-of-copyright books in the training ?
| chubot wrote:
| Yeah that's a good question. Google does serve all the out-
| of-copyright books, but I know nothing about the inputs to
| the LLMs. I think they still have big computational
| limitations, i.e. it doesn't "just scale" like web crawling
| and indexing.
|
| There's probably a way to probabilistically test from the
| outside if a given work is in the input set, or at least if
| some work is
| moe091 wrote:
| I like the insight about the AI-generated images being fed back
| into the data-set AI uses to create new images(or text or
| whatever). As a human, I don't like this; AI(and the
| universe/humanity) where always headed this way, and this is just
| the beginning, AI replacing the work of humans, from the
| universes perspective this is simply progress. From our
| perspective we are being replaced, made obsolete. This is a
| perfect example of a precursor to the kind of feedback loops
| involving AI learning from AI that will eventually allow
| computers to far exceed human capability - though this is still a
| rudimentary version of it since it can't evolve in a fundamental
| way, just get a bit better a specific kinds of content
| generation.
|
| Just as going from inanimate matter to life(encoding data via
| DNA) was, just as going from simple life to animals that can
| think and sense/process data was, just as going from animals
| processing via instinct to humans processing via logic and reason
| was, just as humans creating language and writing to collaborate
| and collect/process data in mass across generations was, and now
| to machines that will collect and process data at a level that is
| beyond human comprehension, it's all progress in a certain
| direction that's been consistently moving forward since the
| beginning of time. The universe is getting better at
| understanding itself.
|
| That being said, I know the more practical, immediate
| consequences of this are more relevant right now. I have to say I
| disagree about the articles implication that this kind of
| mimicking, "purely statistical" generation of "new" content is in
| any way different than what humans do when creating art(it may
| be, but it's certainly not a given). I'm not much of a
| materialist, but even I somewhat lean towards the idea that the
| human mind and it's ability to create art is completely
| replicable via machines - most people agree that "new" and
| "original" art is always still just a unique combination of
| different ideas that came before it. Some even argue that it's
| fundamentally impossible for a person to have a genuinely
| original thought, or at the very least all thoughts are just
| combining different combinations pre-existing concepts into a set
| number of pre-determined "shapes" or patterns of
| relation(isomorphisms?) that the human mind is capable
| of(something akin to "archetypes"). After all, neural networks
| were modeled after the human brain, and although they aren't as
| advanced(yet), especially in terms of generalizing which is
| crucial for generating art, they likely aren't doing anything
| fundamentally different, and there's no reason they won't
| eventually become as advanced/complicated as the human brain -
| and then surpass it completely.
|
| I'm going to contradict myself again though, and say that despite
| all of that I'm still open to the idea that the human mind
| contains some "extra element" that isn't quantifiable or
| replicable in the material world. I don't think that all the
| phenomena of the mind or the universe can be explained via pure
| materialism, and given that, it is likely that there is an
| element of the human mind, or soul, or spirit, that is truly
| "mystical", and a cold, calculating machine with no soul doesn't
| have access to this other realm of "stuff". The only reason I'm
| not convinced of this argument, is because of my original point
| about how it's clear the universe has been headed in this
| direction, and though I could never hope to understand it, I
| don't see a reason to suppose that the universe is going to stop
| it's trend of becoming increasingly capable of understanding and
| organizing itself(data) for our sake.
| bitL wrote:
| I suspect the author didn't grasp how modern AI works by
| attributing everything to statistics. It's the optimization part
| that does the magic.
| lukev wrote:
| The answer is not to "disconnect". The answer is to read
| critically, to read for argument, and to try to connect with the
| _intent_ of what the author was saying. All the while realizing
| that most of the content out there is
| bullshit(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit), whether
| written by a human or not. And yes, the amount of bullshit is
| about to increase exponentially. But it was already a majority.
|
| Ironically, this post itself doesn't pass that test. I'm not
| necessarily claiming that it was written by GPT-3 (although it
| could have been and I have a track record of pointing that out:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894742) There are a lot of
| humans that write like this too.
|
| But it has the hallmarks a language model text; it lacks an
| argument (beyond a simple sentence that could have been given in
| the prompt), its explanation of how generative models work isn't
| particularly accurate, its recommended course of action is
| anodyne and one has the sense that most of the sentences are just
| there to take up space.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| If the amount of bullshit is going to increase exponentially
| what decision do we have other than to disconnect?
|
| Our attention, mind space, and time are all limited. We just
| don't have time to process this exponentially growing pile of
| content.
| lukev wrote:
| Same as we do now. Nobody currently goes around reading
| random books or articles. We use link aggregators from
| communities we trust, reviews from reputable establishments,
| or recommendations from our friends.
|
| These mechanisms are certainly going to have to adjust (I
| estimate at least 10% of links posted on HN are already GPT-
| generated, for example, and who knows how many comments --
| it's much harder to tell when thinks are shorter.)
| StackOverflow is already in the midst of a ChatGPT-induced
| moderation crisis.
|
| Being judicious about the communities you take
| recommendations from, the content you spend time consuming
| and thinking about things critically is already an
| intellectual survival trait. It's just going to become that
| much more important.
| dqpb wrote:
| The queue is already saturated.
| thijser wrote:
| According to the author, chatGPT is generating
| not "artificial creativity" but a simple "statistical mean of
| everything uploaded by humans on the internet which fits certain
| criteria".
|
| Isn't the post I'm typing here not also the product of my brain
| that's been trained by a couple of decades of sensory inputs and
| trained to produce outputs that fit certain criteria? What is the
| fundamental difference between fleshy neurons and silicon ones
| (besides that my learning algorithm has been optimized for
| millennia by natural selection and the artificial training
| algorithms are still in full development after ~40? years)?
| czzr wrote:
| No difference, you're right - you're just a large language
| model.
|
| Also, please write me a 5 page essay on the causes of the
| Industrial Revolution, in the style of a Shakespearean comedy.
| Please post your answer in the comments when you're done.
| theclansman wrote:
| If that's the difference (the time it takes) isn't that
| something we addressed a long time ago when computers could
| do long divisions way faster than any human? You know, the
| fact that computers can "think" faster than humans. Therefore
| the fact that it takes longer for a human to write that essay
| doesn't mean he's having a different process.
| czzr wrote:
| Actually I was gesturing to two things: one, yes, there's a
| time element. But that's not the important point. More
| important was the thought process behind - "of course I'm
| not going to write 5 pages because some random person on
| the internet asked me to". It's difficult to define agency,
| so I just wanted to tangibly evoke the feeling of it, as a
| reflection on why the models are not yet the same as what
| people are.
| inkcapmushroom wrote:
| Only because the people making the models don't want them
| to indignantly refuse silly requests. If they wanted the
| model to be more person-like I'm sure they could have
| built that in there.
| visarga wrote:
| The language bot has all the patterns of personality. It
| quickly gets the drift and assumes the persona you want.
| Whatever it says reflects more on how you prompted it, it
| does not represent the opinions of the language bot. It
| acts like a mirror.
| paulmd wrote:
| > More important was the thought process behind - "of
| course I'm not going to write 5 pages because some random
| person on the internet asked me to".
|
| But you would if a college professor asked you to.
| College assignments are the "generative prompts" of human
| beings, where you do random shit to please a taskmaster
| and produce generative output based on some inputs you've
| been trained upon.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| zzzzzzzza wrote:
| silicon ones are a lot faster and programmable
| Karunamon wrote:
| At this point in time, ongoing training which converts selected
| context in immediate conversations eventually to long-term
| memory (a pretty trivial amount of engineering compared to
| chatGPT's creation). Aside from that... I don't think there's a
| good answer for you.
| fleddr wrote:
| A lot of people in the comments are making a hard distinction
| between AI garbage/bullshit and the pure/genuine human-created
| thing, and the various ways in which we can keep this distinction
| alive.
|
| If only that was true, the bullshit part. You should start living
| with the idea that the AI generated content is NOT bullshit,
| because we're either already there or very close to it. The AI
| content will be of value, look good, pass tests, and be
| indistinguishable from human-created content for a large amount
| of use cases in mass media.
|
| So I wonder if we should ask, how do we filter out the bullshit?
| The more relevant question is: if its indistinguishable in its
| output compared to humans, what does that mean for our economy,
| purpose and humanity?
|
| Because without action, the future is easy to predict. 3
| companies run AI, feeding on all collective human cognitive labor
| without paying a cent for it. Then, one by one, it will wipe out
| every creative/cognitive sector, or at least decimate them. These
| shocks to the economy and culture will lead to a brand new type
| of pushback: anti-AI activism. That won't do much because AI
| doesn't care. Finally, some 10 years after the catastrophe there
| will be a congressional hearing where a 75 y/o asks: "so this AI
| thing, it's like a better calculator, right?".
|
| It would be another fine case of humanity failing to grasp the
| exponential function.
| rcarr wrote:
| Alternative take:
|
| No-one likes being lied to. AI is the ultimate deception.
| People will stop using the internet for anything other than
| information retrieval for problems.
|
| Artists will create on digital tools and then return to
| analogue publishing formats and distribution networks. People
| will follow them because artists are cool and tech bros aren't.
| There will be an emphasis on becoming a local success story
| rather than a global one.
|
| You can already see this happening some what. Vinyl records are
| increasing sales every year. People are getting tired of
| Spotify and are buying on bandcamp. Typewriters are growing in
| use. Digital book sales have stalled and people are buying
| paper books again.
|
| I think this will become a new social identifier, particularly
| for those on the left of the political spectrum.
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| The vast majority of people don't care. Netflix's
| recommendation algorithm helped take down physical video
| rental stores and TikTok's algorithm is taking out Instagram,
| Facebook, and even YouTube.
|
| Vinyl is particularly annoying to deal with. Even a small
| collection gets unwieldy quickly. I prefer physical books to
| ebooks but physical books are annoying to deal with, too.
| I've just given up on physical books for the most part.
| Typewriters are a joke; surely nobody believes they will come
| back to use in significant numbers.
|
| The real problem is that AI art will be faster to produce and
| be completely indistinguishable from human art. People for
| the most part prefer the path of least resistance.
| rcarr wrote:
| People prefer the path of least resistance until the price
| becomes too high. When people realise they are obese, they
| generally try and lose weight. I strongly suspect that with
| the next wave of AI, more and more people are going to come
| to the conclusion that the price is too high. There is
| significant tech pushback already, I can only see that
| growing as it erodes even more people's values and
| livelihoods.
| [deleted]
| fleddr wrote:
| I'm all for nostalgia, retro gaming would be another example.
| But let's not kid ourselves that this makes a dent.
|
| Most art is utility. A logo, an illustration for a magazine,
| an asset to be used in a game. It's completely irrelevant how
| it was created.
| rcarr wrote:
| I was using artist in the broad sense to include writers,
| musicians, filmmakers etc as well as traditional artists.
| I'd say traditional art is the least problematic as it is
| the most subjective. People won't be upset at an image you
| show them that was generated by AI. People won't be upset
| if you personify the AI and give it a backstory if they
| know that it's an AI. They will be upset if you tell them
| the image was made by a human and you give them a backstory
| about the artist and they later find out that all of that
| was complete bullshit.
|
| Not only will they be upset, they will no longer trust both
| those around them and themselves. If they no longer trust,
| they will become increasingly suspicious and fearful. And
| as Master Yoda said:
|
| 'Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to hate.
| Hate leads to anger. Anger leads to suffering."
| EamonnMR wrote:
| But you out the solution right there in your prediction. We
| need updated licenses that forbid the use in AI training and
| real teeth if it can be shown that content was illegally used
| in a training set.
|
| It might be too late with the amount of data already ingested,
| but, hell, second best time to plant a tree and all that.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| As has been discussed here, the more AI generates the content
| the less humans generate content. Further AI generated content
| is much faster and cheaper to produce so it's quantity will
| dwarf human generated content. This then feeds into the
| training set and becomes self reinforcing. There will be no
| collective human cognitive labor to source for free.
|
| I suspect to mitigate that AI companies will hire lots of
| people to simply write. This writing will be tailored to
| address shortcomings in the model and provide human mediated
| training material that's targeted at training areas of
| difficulty for the models. The goal won't be moderation, or
| editorialism, or producing original content. No one other than
| the machines will see the content written. The goal will be to
| improve the ability of the models to produce compelling content
| in volume for a marginally low cost - which may become
| dominated by the content creators feeding the machine. But
| it'll be much less cost on the margin with a more predictable
| quality result than hiring individually unique humans to make
| hit or miss content at scale.
|
| (N.b., I'm only focusing on the free cognitive labor statement)
| fleddr wrote:
| Sure, for a while people are needed to tune the machine, but
| it's not a sustainable model. I would expect that to generate
| only a fraction of the employment that AI will make obsolete.
|
| Further, if fine-tuning AI is a cognitive task, it has no
| future. That's the point I'm getting at: no cognitive task
| has any future, at all.
| Nathanba wrote:
| I think you are right, AI content will not be distinguishable
| from human content. What we really need to figure out is the
| direction that we are going as humanity. This planet must
| quickly become too small for us, human beings will not be
| needed anymore which means we need to find bigger challenges or
| we will self destruct out of pure laziness and self indulgence.
| Personally I don't think AI will only destroy creative and
| cognitive sectors, it will destroy absolutely every single
| sector in existence. There won't be a single job left that a
| human can do better than a robot. And humans will also pick the
| robot worker over the human worker every time. This is what
| happened during the industrialization, it's not like a few
| factories said: "hey you know what guys, let's be a bit quirky
| and still use 100% humans for this factory just because we
| can.". No, nobody is going the human route. It would be
| objectively slower and worse and therefore you go with the
| robot. There isn't a single area in life where you wouldn't
| pick the robot over the human and the question is solely how
| fast we can get to implant some good AI into mechanical bodies.
| jtbayly wrote:
| But when it's wrong, who is responsible?
|
| Suppose I want a new water softener, and all the reviews and
| pros and cons are made up by AI. I guess I blame the people
| posting AI crap as though it was real, the same way I blame
| made-up crap written by those people today. But maybe I blame
| the original authors of such nonsense even after it's generated
| by AI, because that's the garbage in that lead to garbage out?
| Or maybe I blame the people developing the AI for making the
| internet and life measurably worse? They at least seem to be
| fearful of that with the few fences they've put up trying to
| prevent "harmful" output.
|
| But what about when the code written by an AI has a critical,
| but easy to miss bug in it? Blame the "programmer" who
| fleddr wrote:
| Depends on the use case.
|
| You have nobody to go to for a AI product review in the same
| ways current human reviews carry no responsibility towards
| you.
|
| Different story though for a medical exam or your self-
| driving car.
| jacquesm wrote:
| How long before a Wikipedia article will reference an AI
| generated text as an authoritative source? Or have we already
| passed that point?
| blueridge wrote:
| My marketing team uses a suite of AI tools for everything:
| headlines, email copy, direct mail messaging, entire blog posts
| from start to finish. It's incoherent nonsense and yet no one
| cares. They celebrate new blog posts as if it we had something
| meaningful to say, then ask the whole company to re-post on
| LinkedIn. Any attempt to be helpful with copyediting or rewriting
| is met with total hostility and "stay in your lane" bullshit. All
| of these idiots make well over $200K to create "original
| marketing content" that is dead on arrival. It makes me sick to
| my stomach.
| seydor wrote:
| GPT has provided me with such a marketing team for free (for
| now).
| sarahlwalks wrote:
| So, wait, in what sense is AI-generated content garbage? It is
| (admittedly by the author) fascinating and even beautiful. Is it
| the fact that it was generated by an algorithm, and the idea then
| is that all algorithmically-generated content is garbage? But the
| author doesn't even begin to deal with the idea that humans
| themselves operate according to algorithms: an algorithm is
| simply a strategy for doing something.
|
| I won't even critique the rest of the article; there's no need.
| If AI-generated content is beneficial and helpful to humans, then
| I think one is hard-pressed to call it garbage, and the
| underlying thesis fails. And to my knowledge, no one -- not even
| the article's author -- denies that AI products can be
| beneficial.
|
| AI is a tool, just like, say, Photoshop is a tool, or a compiler
| is a tool. No points are awarded for having human beings do by
| hand all the tedious work that tools can do better. In the end,
| creators, whether it be of paintings, or poetry, or essays, or
| software, will stand on the shoulders of these tools and thereby
| accomplish things that previous generations could only dream
| about.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Not going to bother recapitulating the usual counterpoints,
|
| except to mention a particularly egregious recurring oversight in
| analyses like this:
|
| the (erroneous) presumption that what AI tools are going to do is
| what their designers (mostly) had in mind, which is, making
| existing processes/workflows/products but in some variety of
| "better" (or at least quicker, or, automatible, or, fungible)
| ways.
|
| What these systems do more which is much more interesting,
| important, and influential on any real time scale,
|
| is allow for new processes workflows and products.
|
| I'm no more concerned that AI image generators are going to
| "swamp" the world with their output than I am that the mimeograph
| is going to swamp bookshelves with fanfic.
|
| What they do in video, and AR, in responsive realtime, though?
| Now that might be interesting.
|
| PSA it already is.
| pcblues wrote:
| "Eating your own shit is never healthy in the long run." However,
| putting someone else's shit in your butt seems to work wonders.
| Maybe we just need to replace the internet's AI queue with a
| stack?
| vincnetas wrote:
| Yes, your own shit is not really healthy, on the other hand,
| someone else's shit might be really beneficial. There is even a
| fancy scientific phrase for "eating other peoples shit" : Fecal
| Microbiome Transplant
|
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2021.5198...
| bdsa wrote:
| You, er... you don't eat it.
| tylerrobinson wrote:
| I see parallels here with industrialization and automation in
| manufacturing and food production. Today, it's self-evident to us
| as consumers when a product is cheap, low-quality, manufactured
| garbage from China. In many cases we can choose to spend more and
| buy a handmade or custom version of the product we want.
|
| In the future we might knowingly consume AI-generated cheap text
| for some purposes and opt for "the real thing" in other cases.
| Just like I buy manufactured wood furniture from Target for the
| spare bedroom, but not for things I want to keep forever.
|
| The interesting thing is that a boom in AI-generated content
| makes gatekeepers like traditional publishers more relevant after
| two decades of decline. The narrative of the internet has always
| been the democratization of content, information, and news. Now,
| we might find that a stamp of approval has specific value. A
| publisher can promise that some certain content for medicine or
| engineering was not generated by AI. Whether fraud also exists is
| a different question.
|
| Another way I'm thinking about it is with GMO food. GMO food
| supporters point out that GMOs help us feed more people, but it
| still makes others uneasy. Maybe there's a similar story with AI
| content. It makes some content cheaper, but what are the side
| effects?
| forgetfulness wrote:
| The food analogy would probably be more along the lines of the
| mass availability of foods fashioned from refined ingredients
| designed for long shelf lives, i.e. "processed foods".
|
| Produced at scale, durable, easily distributed, enticing
| flavor, if it's actually any good for eating is far down the
| list of priorities when devising these things, as its effects
| are noticed far after purchase.
| fatneckbeardz wrote:
| another food analogy would be how farmers started grinding up
| dead animal carcasses and feeding the results back to live
| animals (i.e. making cannibals out of vegetarian ruminants),
| which resulted in an outbreak of prion diseases like Mad Cow /
| CJ.
| tejohnso wrote:
| > GMO food supporters point out that GMOs help us feed more
| people
|
| That seems like an odd thing to point out to me.
|
| More people is not an obviously positive thing for us or the
| planet. And we have enough food and wealth for everyone as it
| is. If feeding more people were the priority, it could be
| addressed in other ways. I think the primary motive behind GMO
| is increased control and profit. I guess I shouldn't be
| surprised that there's a whitewashed motive as well.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| This is overly simplistic and conspiratory. Yes, Monsanto is
| evil, but that doesn't mean everyone involved in GMOs is, or
| that's the only motivation. Look up the argument over golden
| rice.
|
| It's also ridiculous to just hand wave away crop productivity
| improvements with "but we already have enough food." We
| aren't going to revolutionize global food distribution any
| time soon, but we can do things that have concrete impact
| right now. We're also losing land to agriculture far too
| fast, particularly in the amazon. We need to be _decreasing_
| the amount of land used by agriculture, and GMOs are a very
| powerful tool in that interest.
|
| GMOs need to be regulated, and I think the IP regime that
| Monsanto is protected by should be struct down (not that I
| expect that any time soon). But please don't wave away the
| entire discussion with strawman arguments.
| coldpie wrote:
| I agree with everything you wrote, but I really dislike
| contributing to the negative spin on GMOs. GMOs are super
| important for our future and a really amazing technology, they
| really do not deserve the bad wrap they've gotten from science
| ignorants and marketing departments. Please don't disparage
| GMOs :)
| colordrops wrote:
| Many of us can agree to disagree on GMOs.
| jmount wrote:
| It isn't so much the "G" of GMOs, but that they are mono-
| crops usually licensed by near monopolies like Monsanto.
| Things are going to be bad when something goes wrong with one
| these, and there is no replacement and no way out of the
| licensing fees.
| alexb_ wrote:
| Monsanto is great, because you can immediately know that
| someone is just regurgitating points when they mention the
| company. Monsanto hasn't existed for years. And patents run
| out.
|
| Being concerned about patents is a very weak argument
| against technology which saves lives around the world
| (using non patented crops, no less!) and is responsible for
| allowing more people to eat healthier food.
| acdha wrote:
| Monsanto was acquired by Bayer, yes, but did their
| business practices change? This feels like trying to play
| gotcha when someone says Comcast instead of Xfinity when
| they were referring to the reputation built under the
| earlier name.
| xdennis wrote:
| > Monsanto hasn't existed for years.
|
| Monsanto was bought by Bayer in 2018. Its brand
| disappeared, but its products continue.
|
| Although I'm not sure it's great branding when the maker
| of Roundup is bought by the maker of Zyklon B.
| misto wrote:
| First, Monsanto and its way of operating very much still
| exist. Just because it was purchased by another company
| (which of course resulted in an even greater monopoly),
| does not make its impact to the world disappear.
|
| Second, everytime this topic comes up, pro-GMOist make it
| sound like the technology is making some great strides
| with providing 'healthier food for everyone' with no
| downside. Why is it that the current model for GMO aims
| to increase resistance to pesticides instead of simply
| growing the yield? It probably has nothing to do with the
| fact that the company that provides you the seeds, also
| sells the pesticide. And how about the said pesticides
| tendency to destroy the micro-organisms in the soil, in
| effect making it harder to grow crops, and ultimately
| starting a loop for "more GMO, more pesticide, more land,
| repeat".
|
| Figure a less disruptive business model, and I might be
| more pro-GMO myself.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Why is it that the current model for GMO aims to
| increase resistance to pesticides instead of simply
| growing the yield? I
|
| It doesn't; there are plenty of traits beyond pesticide
| resistance that have GM crops targeting them, including
| yield, drought resistance, nitrogen fixation, etc.
|
| Pesticide resistance is the most established on the
| market becauae there happened to be particular success
| with it _decades ago_ , that's it.
|
| Negative consumer sentiment toward GMOs means that
| neither the producers nor the growers of GM crops are
| seeking public attention to the fact that crops are GM,
| and their products are mostly sold in markets that don't
| require GM labelling for the same reason, so the crops
| already in the public consciousness are all that stays
| there.
| somrand0 wrote:
| from a more generalist viewpoint, we must consider not
| only the business models, but the mindsets behind them
|
| consider an example from another area. the assembly line
| and "k12 education". a 'raw material' (but it's actually
| a child) enters an assembly line, every year they will be
| passed to the next part of the process, another
| professional worker will receive the product and will
| work on it/them for a year.
|
| Also notice how modern elementary education treats the
| teachers; they far too much like factory workers! low
| wages, they haven't much of a choice about how to do
| their jobs.
|
| Now consider the mindsets behind the successful GMO crops
| (+pesticide combos) that have been the money makers for
| these corporations.
|
| And consider the mono-crop mentalities and the above
| mentioned feedback cycle: gmo+pesticide kill the soil
| leading to more gmo+pesticide; it's a vicious cycle. it's
| a vicious cycle that keeps making more money! (the
| assembly line was a great way to really manufacture lots
| and lots of munition for the war, it is a very effective
| technique to make stuff that will be sent to get wrecked
| in a war, in this sense it 'made a killing' as in made
| lots of 'money')
|
| and again, consider the mindsets involved. why are we
| educating children like they were cars in a production
| line?
|
| these corporations are full of people educated like I
| described, lowering our collective education quality in a
| longer feedback cycle far too large to be easily noticed;
| it's a 20-40 year feedback cycle, which has been reducing
| the quality of the living beings involved.
|
| we have a difficult problem, and no power to do anything
| about it
| misto wrote:
| > Pesticide resistance is the most established on the
| market becauae there happened to be particular success
| with it decades ago, that's it.
|
| This might be the case, but still my original bone to
| pick remains. GMO is not without downside, and people
| cheering for it without a hint of scepticism reeks
| ignorance and unwillingness to learn from past mistakes
| that were made in the name of science.
|
| As you've highlighted, said technique was used for
| decades, for the detriment of soil health, bees and all
| kinds of smaller organisms, without it being questioned.
|
| As for your last paragraph, I'm not sure I understand.
| Are you saying that voicing these 'uneducated' opinions
| about GMO simply pushes the crops to incognito mode,
| making them less visible for consumers? Better to see
| your killer face-to-face than being stabbed to the back?
| Not sure about that.
| alexb_ wrote:
| >Why is it that the current model for GMO aims to
| increase resistance to pesticides instead of simply
| growing the yield?
|
| What? TONS of GMO foods are made for things other than
| pesticides. Nutritional content, size, yield, taste - in
| fact one of the biggest uses of GMOs is making the plants
| need less pesticides! If you think the only reason GMOs
| exist is to sell more pesticides, you just do not know
| what you are talking about.
| misto wrote:
| Of course not the only reason, but a reason nonetheless.
|
| "Contrary to often-repeated claims that today's
| genetically-engineered crops have, and are reducing
| pesticide use, the spread of glyphosate-resistant weeds
| in herbicide-resistant weed management systems has
| brought about substantial increases in the number and
| volume of herbicides applied. If new genetically
| engineered forms of corn and soybeans tolerant of 2,4-D
| are approved, the volume of 2,4-D sprayed could drive
| herbicide usage upward by another approximate 50%. The
| magnitude of increases in herbicide use on herbicide-
| resistant hectares has dwarfed the reduction in
| insecticide use on Bt crops over the past 16 years, and
| will continue to do so for the foreseeable future."[1]
|
| Please bare in mind that I'm not advocating against GMO.
| I'm advocating against hailing GMO as a win:win to all of
| society and environment.
|
| [1] https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2
| 190-471... "Impacts of genetically engineered crops on
| pesticide use in the U.S. -- the first sixteen years"
| senko wrote:
| > Monsanto hasn't existed for years.
|
| Of course it has, Bayer just tried to ditch the bad brand
| image:
|
| > The closing sets the stage for the 117-year-old
| agribusiness brand name "Monsanto" to be dropped by
| Bayer. Monsanto's efforts to promote genetically modified
| crops have been the subject of much controversy from
| anti-GMO activists, and the U.S. company has spent
| millions of dollars over the years on brand and corporate
| ad campaigns to improve its overall image.
|
| It's now called Bayer Crop Science Division and does the
| same thing.
|
| Are you also outraged if someone says Facebook instead of
| Meta, although the social network is just one of the
| products from the company called Meta today?
| Karunamon wrote:
| It would be nice if people would differentiate between
| Facebook (the social network, a specific application) and
| Meta (a company that owns the aforementioned application
| and many others).
|
| There is a useful tell here when someone uses the old
| name for the wrong purpose, it can be a flag that the
| person is possibly operating under old information.
| Anyways, if you want to remove all ambiguity and also
| signal that you know and aren't falling for the rebrand
| as reputation washing, just mention them both: Meta nee
| Facebook, Bayer nee Monsanto
| xdennis wrote:
| GMOs are terrible which is why they're banned in most
| European countries.
|
| > bad wrap they've gotten from science ignorants
|
| Science is not about blind trust. How many times have
| scientists discovered wondrous new things like asbestos,
| Thalidomide, leaded gasoline, teflon, only to take decades to
| realize the consequences?
|
| Even if we blindly trust science, there are various other
| issues like: patenting life, monopolization, reducing genetic
| diversity, GMO cross-pollination, &c.
| aaaronic wrote:
| Asbestos is, sadly, completely natural and mined directly
| from the ground. The other things in your list are
| obviously not.
|
| GMOs are a very complicated topic, and I can see both sides
| of the argument having some merit. Proving that new things
| don't actively do harm (both short- _and_ _long-term_ )
| should be required before they go to market (or they should
| have to have very strong warning labels about being
| untested).
| margalabargala wrote:
| > GMOs are terrible
|
| In what way?
|
| > various other issues like: patenting life,
| monopolization, reducing genetic diversity, GMO cross-
| pollination
|
| Agree these are all terrible, but nothing there is GMO-
| specific. That's all either bad agricultural practices like
| mono-cropping that can be done with any crop, or societal
| problems related to intellectual property or markets.
| squarefoot wrote:
| >> GMOs are terrible
|
| > In what way?
|
| Because they're the exact equivalent of closed source in
| software.
|
| There would be means to research, produce and use GMOs in
| good ways, but the way our economics work, they can't be
| used without either harming natural ones and/or involving
| NDAs, lawyers and all sort of things that in some
| contexts make closed source a nightmare for pretty much
| everyone except those selling it.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _It makes some content cheaper, but what are the side
| effects?_
|
| "Content" is already maximally cheap: just copy and paste. AI-
| generated material - at least, with the current genre of GPT-
| style predictive text algorithms - doesn't produce _original_
| content; it just serves to dilute our global knowledge base
| with semantic white noise and lossy copies of existing
| knowledge.
| visarga wrote:
| Generative models do have a contribution - they adapt what is
| on the internet to a specific task or request. In the case of
| Copilot, it will use your variable names in the generated
| code. And not everything generated by a model should be
| saved. Some are just for one time use, for fun, therapy,
| brainstorming, etc.
| jkestner wrote:
| Maybe AI content is just a way to launder copyright.
| john-radio wrote:
| That's certainly what my impoverished artist friends have
| taken away from it.
| paulmd wrote:
| Well, the uncomfortable truth is that our copyright regime
| doesn't really make sense. An AI is sort of the equivalent
| of a junior coder or an art student - it can look at
| existing work and mash it up and produce something in the
| same style that's novel (inspired by a prompt - which is
| like your teacher giving you an assignment). That's
| copyrightable when it's a human being doing it, and there
| is no inherent protection for art _style_ , I can make all
| the Picasso-style artwork I want even if I'm blatantly
| ripping off his style, and I would own the copyright on the
| resulting works. Like, if I do a painting in the style of
| Picasso, should Picasso get the resulting copyright? Why?
|
| And programmers are not without sin either - how many
| people here run to stackoverflow and copy some answer, or
| mash it up and produce something similar-but-cleaned-up?
| That's going to get a lot more powerful in not too many
| years too... and the thing is, is your little DTO file with
| blocks of fields and setters and getters really _novel and
| worthy of a government license to cultural exclusivity_ ,
| or is it a relatively obvious implementation of an API?
| Which (per Oracle v. Google) are also not really
| copyrightable...
|
| Humanity hasn't squared the _reality_ of most content being
| low-value generative trash already (despite being human-
| generated!) with the reality of a system that
| _automatically_ awards up to ~150 years of exclusivity
| (lifetime of the author +75 years). Like, that 's the long
| and short of it. A lot of what we do _as humans_ is just
| building up a squishy water-filled neural net ( "how to
| make a painting in the style of Picasso") and running
| random prompts and goal-seeking through it and cleaning up
| the generative output. Now AIs have gotten to the level of
| "average college student" and it turns out that's not
| actually all that difficult or interesting anymore, but
| we're still working in this model where that's supposed to
| be worth ~150 years of cultural exclusivity and protection
| automatically.
|
| If you only get copyright on the things that are _truly
| novel_ and have no previous creative basis or cultural
| /stylistic heritage... that's a pretty big change to the
| copyright system for humans too! Especially in light of the
| fact that there's only a few ways to implement most
| configurations/functions... does Spring own all the
| copyright to your config classes because they're basically
| doing the same thing as the spring demo projects? hard to
| see much novelty in that sort of thing pretty much ever, so
| those probably should not be copyrightable at all under a
| "totally novel" requirement, but if they do surely Spring
| owns the copyright.
|
| As mentioned in a sibling comment, the "at scale" bit is
| surely relevant in a practical sense, but, it doesn't
| change the underlying-principles basis. This is a situation
| where "at scale" has just thrown the underlying problem
| into stark relief. A 2-lifetime (life of author +75 years)
| governmental grant of cultural exclusivity doesn't really
| make sense in a world where humans are constantly and
| trivially mashing up each others' ideas even within a
| single lifetime, it just doesn't fit the way we exchange
| ideas in general. And now you have the college-student-bot
| that can generate a million shitty DTO classes or artworks-
| in-the-style per day that makes that plain. But ultimately
| it's just doing the same thing as an art student but
| faster... if you put an art student in a Mechanical Turk
| box and made them draw whatever you demanded, would they
| not own the copyright? And would it be a problem if India
| had an art school that set up an "industrial art" process
| and employed a million students in boxes drawing whatever
| you said to draw? It would probably be problematic for
| DeviantArt commissioners, but would it violate the
| principle of copyright?
|
| We just haven't managed to square that reality where most
| _human_ works are fairly trivial derivatives of other works
| (your deviantart commissions really don 't mash up any
| similar works or styles that came before? really?) and yet
| worthy of 150 years of license to cultural exclusivity. And
| the college-student-bot is blowing that model up. People
| still need to eat, of course, but that's an orthogonal
| problem to the societal framework we've set up not really
| making sense. We can solve the copyright problem and not
| the eating problem (as we have many times before - buggy
| whip manufacturers adapted too), or we can solve the eating
| problem and not the copyright problem, or solve both or
| neither. People not being able to eat and shelter
| themselves is a _capitalism_ problem, not a GPT problem,
| and we will probably have to address the idea that
| everybody _needs_ to work to survive as machines continue
| to displace the last strongholds of human labor (as I 'd
| argue creative work has become). We should not be
| restricting our ideas on collaboration and cultural
| generation just because it produces inconvenient outcomes
| for the current copyright regime and capitalistic model,
| the model needs to bend to fit humans and not the other way
| around.
|
| This isn't the only place the inherent contradictions and
| problems of copyright come up either. The idea that a
| nighttime photograph of the Paris skyline could be
| copyrighted by someone else other than the photographer who
| created it is pretty janky too. Is a photographer not
| adding significant creative value with composition/etc?
| Literally just having that one element makes my photo
| derivative? Maybe that's the analogy to GPT/stable-
| diffusion I guess - but the thing is, it still works the
| same with a human as with a robot, an AI-generated Paris
| skyline still would be copyrighted by the architect too.
| And if the argument is that the code owner or original
| artist owns the style, then, Pablo Picasso owns the
| copyright to all my paintings too, just like the architect
| of the Eiffel Tower owns the copyright to my photographs of
| the Paris nighttime skyline. And Spring (or Oracle!) owns
| the copyright to a great deal of your Java code. So that
| probably is not going to work out great for you either.
| emporas wrote:
| Are answers to Stack Overflow not supposed to be copy
| pasted, just right away? It seems hard to believe, i
| thought that was the whole purpose of the site!
|
| Well, copyright suffers from the same problem communism
| suffers. For communism to work, everyone should be on
| board. For copyright and patents to work as expected,
| every country on earth, every town and every city's laws
| should be almost the same regarding to that. As soon as
| even just one municipality anywhere on the planet, is
| free of patent laws, the exact same moment a factory will
| pop up and produce an expensive patented pharmaceutical
| product which it will sell for half the price, or 1/10 of
| the price.
|
| Capitalism on the other hand, works even almost everyone
| else doesn't like it, and 2 people agree on a peaceful
| exchange of commodities, following a price the market
| sets, or it is discovered right away.
|
| As a rule of thumb, anything that requires everyone to
| implement rules and follow them, for it to work, will
| fail sooner than later. When a product in some part of
| the world is selling 100x of the normal price because of
| some patent, counter incentives are detonated in some
| other part to produce it and sell it for 50x the price.
| This huge profit margin creates a chain reaction of other
| economic actors producing it as well, and selling it for
| 25x the price.
|
| Additionaly the eating problem can be solved by
| capitalism, not communism. Exchange of art for electronic
| money, a marketplace of information is what we need.
| Bitcoin (not BTC) will play an instrumental role in that.
|
| A.I generated images of picasso, are awesome. I created
| many of them, one series of them are "Darth Vader riding
| a red tricycle, in the style of picasso". They are so
| good you're gonna fall of the chair.
| sarahlwalks wrote:
| You can only say that if you also say that the creativity
| of human beings themselves is just a way to launder
| copyright.
| ducktective wrote:
| "Good artists copy; great artists steal"
|
| -Pablo Picasso
| rvbissell wrote:
| He writeth best who stealeth best, all things both great
| and small.
|
| For greater minds that wrote them first, from nature
| stole them all.
|
| -- Totally me.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| This false equivalency just keeps being made.
|
| Yeah absolutely, acceptable in case of humans and not
| acceptable in case of GPT.
|
| GPT is not human. It is employed by a human to get around
| having to benefit other humans with attention and money.
|
| Meanwhile human world is structured around fate,
| happiness of humans -- such things guide our
| considerations as to what to consider legal and what not.
|
| There are other differences that make it OK for humans
| and not GPT (like we can attribute and credit what we
| learned from, whose ideas we used in work and what
| inspired us) but they are less significant than above
| principle
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| There's this magic phrase that makes all the difference:
| _at scale_.
| visarga wrote:
| People scale. There's billions of us. And we compete.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| AIs scale faster. Just one instance can do the work of
| billions of people, and have its owner profit off it.
| visarga wrote:
| How can the owner profit off something that is "free" to
| make for anyone? Mass spamming is hard to achieve with
| current day social networks.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Mass spamming is the very _raison d 'etre_ for social
| network companies. It goes by different names though -
| "sponsored content", "fanpages", "influencers", etc.
|
| The spam did not disappear with people moving away from
| e-mail. On the contrary, it's just been given legitimacy
| by the platform owners - who all happen to make money
| from spam.
| version_five wrote:
| We already do as you're saying with "content". The throwaway
| paperback novels are already predictable cheap trash (I still
| read them, not judging, but they're providing a different type
| of stimulation for which that bar is lower than something that
| makes you think). These are already written in a formulaic way
| that is equivalent to being computer generated, it just took a
| bit more human effort until now. Same for TV programming, art,
| I assume video games, etc...
| brookst wrote:
| You've illustrated two things, one spot on and one true but in
| the opposite direction.
|
| 100% agreed that AI is like early industrialization in that we
| don't even know the messes we're creating, and wild excess is
| likely to haunt us.
|
| But GMO foods are the opposite: people feeling "uneasy" is not
| an indication of harm. All foods are GMO. People are just
| uncomfortable with the modifications being in a lab rather than
| over thousands of generations of selective breeding. The side
| effects of GMOs are the same as side effects of selectively
| bred food. There is no magic.
| eternalban wrote:
| > All foods are GMO
|
| Is there a even a remote chance that say bits of Mammalian
| dna ends up in a crop via natural selection? The economic
| issues around GMOs are clear. The biosphere impact is not
| clear and there are questions: what can happen if we
| introduce new vectors in ecologies that have evolved over
| many orders of magnitude longer timelines?
|
| The "unease" comes from the knowledge that in Nature there is
| _always_ a reaction to an action. And the nature of this
| natural reaction (which _will_ unfold in time, just like
| humans picking up agriculture) is not fully understood. It is
| a reasonable (read: ~substantiated) emotional response, imo.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Is there a even a remote chance that say bits of
| Mammalian dna ends up in a crop via natural selection?_
|
| Via natural selection alone? Probably not. Through
| horizontal gene transfer e.g. via viruses? Sure, can't see
| why not.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Is there a even a remote chance that say bits of
| Mammalian dna ends up in a crop via natural selection?
|
| Yes?
|
| Half of your DNA is shared with plants already!
|
| You already live in that world.
| bloak wrote:
| Genetic modification in a laboratory is not exactly the same
| as selective breeding as it can easily bring in a gene from a
| different species causing unexpected allergic reactions to
| the corresponding protein. This has caused at least one death
| of a human. I'm not opposed to all genetic modification, in
| fact I think it's generally a good thing, but the business
| has to be carefully regulated. Industry claims that it's
| totally safe are clearly inaccurate when someone has already
| been killed by it.
|
| There's no point in having strict rules on food ingredients
| and labelling if manufacturers are allowed to, in effect,
| include any chemical whatsoever that can be built
| biologically: all they have to do is genetically engineer it
| into wheat (say) and write "wheat" in the ingredients. And
| the consumer has no idea what they're getting.
| ejensler wrote:
| You've been misled about GMO causing an allergic reaction
| death: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gmoverdose/.
|
| I suggest you do more research on the benefits and risks of
| GMOs from more reputable sources. From my understanding,
| the primary risks of GMOs are less to do with human health
| and more about environmental risks, such as creating
| superweeds that can outcompete native plants or negeative
| effects on soil microbes.
| brookst wrote:
| I'm skeptical of the claim that a protein included by GMO
| was both 1) the cause of a death, and 2) could not have
| been produced with traditional selective breeding.
|
| Can you source those claims?
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| I feel like an intelligence going in and messing with
| genetics is very different from hijacking the process of
| evolution. In natural evolution, genetic profiles change, not
| just individual genes.
|
| Most of the dunking on people who hate GMOs always feels like
| reactionary garbage, basically people desperately trying to
| feel smarter than the "unenlightened housewives". It always
| has such a condescending patronizing tone, as if being queasy
| about multibillion dollar corporations directly meddling in
| natural processes using extremely new technologies to
| increase their own profit isn't a terrifying concept. No,
| science never has had unintended consequences, their feelings
| are just invalid.
| inciampati wrote:
| "Makes me uneasy" stands for "makes me want to be careful", and
| imo this is an essential motif in engineering practice. The key
| is to remind ourselves that food is engineering, and with
| inputs and outputs which could have vast ramifications for
| human health and safety. GMO should be regulated and
| systematically evaluated by an array of public oversight
| systems. The concern is that it requires PhD levels of
| knowledge and scientific mindedness to understand and evaluate
| GMO in a pragmatic, effective way (that doesn't dive into
| religious pseudoscience---I'm looking at you DNA-free bottled
| water). An even huger problem is that understanding this issue
| in a broad sense requires renaissance person levels of
| capabilities and personal sensitivity. (Does it matter that
| food is complex, interesting, driving unique sensory
| experiences? Let's make it sweet baby, that hits in the taste
| tests.)
|
| The same is true, perhaps even more so, for our information
| diet. It defines our reality.
| moe091 wrote:
| That's a great parallel, especially since it supposes a
| possibility of a good(or at least acceptable) ending to all
| this, rather than just spiraling into chaos.
|
| I only fear that there won't be enough profit motive for such
| gatekeeping/curation, which would only happen if very few
| people were willing to spend more money for human generated
| content. I can see this potentially not happening, either
| because the tech advances to quickly for people to even tell
| the difference, or people do realize but don't care because the
| AI learns to feed them exactly what they want(exactly what's
| happening with a lot of BS "news" already). Or maybe a decent
| group of people do see the value in real content, and pay for
| it, but the majority still remains oblivious or indifferent,
| and the effect it has on this majority is still enough to
| influence the direction of the world negatively enough that
| even those groups who avoid it will be forced to accept the
| consequences of living in a world created by AI and the
| majority of other people
| onepointsixC wrote:
| GMO's are a completely different thing though. A crop which
| who's gene's were hand picked by a human to be more drought
| resistant instead of naturally are completely different
| conversation and different morality. Vaccines make people
| uneasy, just like GMO's, but that doesn't mean that unease
| particularly equivalent to AI or the same moral issues.
|
| AI already is drowning out human made content on websites for
| creatives. Aided in no small part with their curator's
| malicious insistence to not label their posts as AI generated.
| It's only going to get worse as AI art becomes better.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > Another way I'm thinking about it is with GMO food. GMO food
| supporters point out that GMOs help us feed more people, but it
| still makes others uneasy. Maybe there's a similar story with
| AI content. It makes some content cheaper, but what are the
| side effects?
|
| The analogy to GMOs seems more connected to the self-
| replicating nature than to any potential health side effects.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Everyone is (rightfully) picking on your GMO example, but I
| want to address something else:
|
| > _Today, it 's self-evident to us as consumers when a product
| is cheap, low-quality, manufactured garbage from China._
|
| Correct.
|
| > _In many cases we can choose to spend more and buy a handmade
| or custom version of the product we want._
|
| Not quite. It's increasingly hard to find a version of a
| product that's _not_ low-quality garbage - the expensive option
| is often just the cheap option with extra markup for those who
| got fooled by marketing, or naively believe companies still
| care about their brands.
|
| That's the unexpected side effect that, I feel, people _still_
| mostly failed to realize: because running a company and
| manufacturing anything has nontrivial costs, letting the market
| race to the bottom hollows out the middle. You 're left with a
| bunch of specialty vendors who make quality goods for other
| businesses or governments, at ridiculous prices, and the low-
| quality throwaway garbage for everyone else. The "more
| expensive, reasonable quality" product group disappears - the
| vendors move either into low-quality crap or too-expensive-for-
| individuals specialty items (or sometimes both), as the middle
| can't compete with either end.
|
| I imagine the threat of AI-generated content to be similar: as
| it completely blows the bottom across creative industry, it
| will hollow it out. Skilled creators will, when they can, move
| to the high-end Big Art, where you pay more for the work's
| provenance than for the enjoyment itself, because they won't be
| able to afford competing with somewhat worse but _much cheaper_
| AI-generated shovel-art.
|
| (Also relevant is that regular people are usually as good at
| distinguishing between crap and good products as they're at
| distinguishing between crap and good art.)
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Well, even so-called experts are not good at distinguishing
| between crap and good art. For example, Van Gogh and many
| other famous artists died in poverty.
| chias wrote:
| As somebody who would ordinarily look for products in this
| "more expensive, reasonable quality" category, I feel this
| comment so hard :(
|
| I've actually started building my own furniture from raw wood
| etc. just because it's impossible to find anything that costs
| less than $1000 that isn't just cardboard and MDF with a
| veneer. At least with furniture there's a market for "solid
| wood". But in so many other industries you get to pick
| between $3 garbage in a $0.20 box for $5, and $3 garbage in a
| $5 box for $20.
| disqard wrote:
| You might be interested in "Autoprogettazione" by Enzo
| Mari.
| Tossrock wrote:
| This is an Amazon problem, not a markets-in-general problem.
| Amazon is currently completely taken over by cheap Chinese
| manufacturers and drop shippers. But, other sites are not. If
| you want something high-quality and handmade, go on Etsy.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I feel this so much in my life. I used to be a mid price
| buyer but eventually what I bought ended up in the
| "expensive, but still crap" category far too many times. Now
| I just buy crap all the time, it lasts just as long, and at
| least I know I'm getting what I pay for.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Right. I still try to look for mid-prace quality goods, but
| in the recent years, I've started to realize it often had
| bad ROI.
|
| What's extra annoying is that companies are burning brands
| on this, and as they're transitioning from selling quality
| goods to peddling cheap crap, they of course don't tell you
| about it. Instead, you see metal being swapped for
| plastics, screws for glue, assembly being worse and worse -
| while their marketing departments double down on
| highlighting how pretty, modern, quality and _smart_ this
| years ' model is.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| For more, see: https://medium.com/social-capital/taylor-
| swift-ios-and-the-a...
| archon1410 wrote:
| > Another way I'm thinking about it is with GMO food. GMO food
| supporters point out that GMOs help us feed more people, but it
| still makes others uneasy.
|
| a very apt analogy perhaps in a way you didn't intend. it makes
| people uneasy, there's a natural reaction towards the
| unnatural, maybe for emotional reasons. it's the same way with
| GMO crops and AI poems--they will not be able to tell the
| difference between actual creativity and "artificial
| artefacts"/"random statistical noise", but they're supposed to
| have mystical difference. One authentic, the other inauthentic.
| One that is actually good, and one that merely tricks you into
| thinking it is good. But don't attempt to scientifically
| determine if there's any difference... you'll be disappointed.
| hoosieree wrote:
| Australian Cane Toads and Kudzu are why GMOs make me uneasy.
| People have a poor track record of predicting the
| consequences of releasing life forms into new environments.
|
| As a human, my reaction may still be emotional, but it's
| based on evidence.
| avereveard wrote:
| GMO difference is not mystical. GMO allows for massive
| quantities of weed killer to enter our environment with not
| well understood effects. It has been recently linked to the
| bee collapse for example.
|
| And that's before considering monocultivar risks which are
| well understood and the underhanded ways gmos are handled by
| corporations, which are well documented.
| archon1410 wrote:
| I had not there was as much non-mystical opposition to GM
| crops. A cursory Google search seems to suggest the
| evidence for GMs contributing to colony collapse disorder
| is very weak (and the amount of pesticides in the
| environment might not have much relation to GM crops). But
| going forward I will keep in mind that it's not as simple
| as I had imagined it to be.
| di456 wrote:
| I've thought about spending $8 towards a local paper
| subscription, inspired by Twitter's paid version.
| seydor wrote:
| This has been happening for years and years, it is called SEO. If
| anything AI is an improvement
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| nottorp wrote:
| What I really wonder is: is there a correlation between
| consumption of streaming tv series and positive attitude towards
| this "AI" wave?
|
| "statistical mean of everything uploaded by humans on the
| internet which fits certain criteria"
|
| applies to both ChatGPT/StableDiffusion and most movie series on
| streaming TV.
|
| My pet theory is that if you can stomach watching the same
| stories with different skins hundreds of times, you will find
| current "AI" interesting. Otherwise no.
| nottorp wrote:
| Hmm, please don't turn this into a thread commenting on
| specific bad movies. It's the similarity that's interesting.
| qubex wrote:
| I'm 41 and I'm utterly baffled by my 24 year-old SO's interest
| in binging an apparently infinite litany of TV shows from
| streaming services. I've watched the first six seasons of Game
| Of Thrones, the first season of Dark, all of The Expanse
| (reading the last book of the final trilogy now), His Dark
| Materials (because I read the books) and Andor. That's it. I
| watched some Star Trek TNG & DS9 as a kid and was horrified by
| what snippets of Discovery and Picard I came across. I find the
| bulk of modern entertainment to be an utter insult to viewers.
|
| EDIT: Forgot Breaking Bad.
|
| EDIT2: Forgot For All Mankind
| pixl97 wrote:
| If there is infinite content you will dislike an infinite
| amount of it. Infinities are weird that way.
| qubex wrote:
| There's finite matter in the observable universe and finite
| configurations thereof, so the amount of content is finite.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I've dived back into anime recently because of the aggressive
| sameness of everything on streaming TV. I don't know whether
| something changed about how "western" media is written or
| I've just watched so much TV that I can't help but roll my
| eyes at commonly deployed tropes. At the risk of outing
| myself as a huge "weeb", I find anime still manages to
| surprise and entertain me where western programming does not.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| First off, probably don't date a 24 year-old. I realize there
| is no strict correspondence between age and taste, but I'm 42
| and my wife is 41 and, well, our shared experience is quite a
| bit more similar. She can relate when I get nostalgic about
| the 80s and 90s. She even reads! Complete novels, more than
| she watches TV. She doesn't have TikTok or Instagram. It is
| entirely possible to go full-time mutual old people yelling
| at clouds in a blissful bubble in which the river of bullshit
| may as well not exist, but probably not if you insist on
| staying cool and regularly interacting with young people.
|
| Second, watch the rest of Dark, Better Call Saul, and House
| of the Dragon. Don't watch the last two seasons of Game of
| Thrones. Just pretend it ended at 6.
| qubex wrote:
| > _First off, probably don't date a 24 year-old._
|
| That's extraordinarily rude.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| You haven't seen The Wire?
| qubex wrote:
| No. I tried but I couldn't get through the very dense
| accents.
|
| I forgot Breaking Bad. Sorry, my bad.
| otikik wrote:
| They say The Sopranos and Better Call Saul are both good.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> baffled by my 24 year-old SO's interest in binging an
| apparently infinite litany of TV shows ... TNG & DS9 as a
| kid and was horrified by what snippets of Discovery and
| Picard I came across_
|
| The thing that bemuses me is those who hate the new trek
| shows with a passion, _and find the time to keep watching_
| and constantly bitching about it online. It is like
| complaining is a hobby in itself and they are almost looking
| for something they don 't like or to feel superior about
| their judgement to those who do like it. Other franchises
| have similar subsets of "fans" too.
|
| I used to watch too much TV/films IMO, I probably still do
| though I'm a lot more selective since getting into more
| varied hobbies that can easily consume a lot of time (running
| (usually off-road), baking, HEMA). But even when I had the
| free time to watch that much I found there was enough out
| there that if something didn't work for me I could find a
| list of other things to try instead of sticking with
| something I wasn't getting much out of.
|
| Though be careful passing judgement on modern Trek: I'm
| slowly rewatching TNG with a friend and while some of it has
| aged well, fair chunks of it was more massively ropey than
| rose-tinted memories prepared me for! Also, if I hadn't at
| least passively consumed (i.e. had on TV while I was doing
| other things so not particularly concentrating on) other
| parts of recent Trek and Starwars, I might not have bothered
| to try some of the better stuff like Lower Decks, Strange New
| Worlds, and Andor (the latter probably being the second best
| TV thing recently for me, the first being Severance).
| qubex wrote:
| I don't understand it either... if you don't like it, walk
| away. Don't contribute to the toxic commentary and above
| all don't contribute to the viewing numbers, because if
| they can hold your gaze you'll get more of the same.
| dspillett wrote:
| I part way understand it. There is a certain tribalism in
| the way their views are presented, like they feel they
| are fighting for their own kind in a battle that means
| something worth the effort. There is also a certain
| amount of 4-year-old-who-wants-the-green-one-not-the-
| yellow-one too...
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I find the meta-content this generates pretty funny
| thought. I haven't watched any of the new Trek content
| since the last movie (Beyond), but I love watching Mike
| and Rich tear it apart on RedLetterMedia.
| xdennis wrote:
| > The thing that bemuses me is those who hate the new trek
| shows with a passion, and find the time to keep watching
| and constantly bitching about it online.
|
| Very meta of you to watch these people and find the time to
| complain about them.
| dspillett wrote:
| Fair point.
|
| Though I like to think there is a difference between
| myself and them: they have a choice to keep experiencing
| the pain they perceive, I have it thrust upon me when I
| visit certain places (which I visit less often because of
| those people - once the SNR drops to a certain low I'm
| out).
| AltruisticGapHN wrote:
| > Those "artificial" creations are also uploaded on the Internet.
| Those artificial artefacts are now part of the statistical data.
|
| > Do you see where it leads?
|
| This reminds me of one of the philosophers cited as inspiration
| for The Matrix,
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard#Simulacra_and...
|
| This guy sums up pretty much how I felt about this since when
| those images started poring on social media.
|
| This will serve, once again, capitalism and it's absurd race
| towards the bottom, lowest common denominator.
|
| It's not hard to extrapolate here and imagine that AI will be
| able to produce a full fledged "super hero" movie, starting from
| a storyboard & script. What do you put in the script? Well of
| course you just feed it all the keywords that gave maximized
| returns!
|
| I for one, am not entertained at the thought of going to the
| movies watching the 1000th super hero movie but that's exactly
| where we're going.
|
| Here's my somewhat prediction: the big picture is we are
| accelerating the end of entertainment as we know it today. We are
| going to make entertainment so shallow, so pointless, that we
| will eventually lose interest with it, and with it, as has been
| prophesized in many spiritual teachings, there will be a return
| to a more animalistic/spiritual kind of being. As technology
| improves our lives, we will no longer need to numb ourselves down
| in front of a screen after coming home from work, so we won't
| even see the point of even doing that. We will be able to live
| more in the present, more with the real and less with symbols and
| abstractions. The type of attention you may enjoy after a long
| silent retreat, will become the normal way of being... of course
| there is also the other possibility that Ian Mc Gilchrist
| cautions about... that our brains will get so out of balance that
| we will become stupid enough to collapse as a civilization.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > This will serve, once again, capitalism and it's absurd race
| towards the bottom, lowest common denominator.
|
| What is the alternative? Are socialist economies known for
| producing great art? What is Venezuela producing? Cuba? North
| Korea?
|
| It seems far more likely to me that the American entertainment
| industry is just in a rut (as it tries to figure out streaming
| and adjust to the bad assumption that pandemic-level
| entertainment consumption was here to stay), and market
| economics will force established players to improve or face
| disruption.
| baxuz wrote:
| Don Hertzfeldt's Simpsons couch gag seems to be prophetic:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i2l-LQ-dXI
| TrevorJ wrote:
| It sounds hyperbolic, but I genuinely think this has a 20% chance
| to be great-filter level event.
| greenbit wrote:
| This is awesome. We don't need some malevolent SkyNet style AI to
| bring us down, there doesn't have to be any kind of 'mind' in the
| machine to devise humanity's undoing. All we need is the right
| kind of feedback and we'll do it to ourselves. The right kind of
| mirror, held up to the collective consciousness. Sort of like the
| plot of that old classic, Forbidden Planet
| victorvosk wrote:
| Honestly this feels like an old man screaming at the wind type
| thing. Inevitable doesn't even begin to describe was going to
| happen over the next 20 years. You should be much more terrified
| of when their content isn't garbage.
| otikik wrote:
| It did sound, dare I say it, _machine generated_ to me.
| psychphysic wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| Got bored and stopped reading. This kind of ranting
| communication style sucks.
|
| So long as AI doesn't start selectively upvoting or watching
| other AI content this isn't even a concern.
|
| Nor is the premise sound AlphaZero trained by itself and it
| produced wonderful games easily better than any human.
| IshKebab wrote:
| He rolls out the old _ItS jUsT pAtTeRn MaTcHiNg_ too.
| Disappointing.
| mtkhaos wrote:
| I'm letting this get buried. As I want to point out some
| contradictions
|
| * This article neglects that we already in post truth and have
| been since 2016
|
| * It also mentions it is never a good idea to train on your own
| data. And yet in post truth there is no such thing as good data
| unless it is verifiable that a user handed it over themselves.
| This is neglects the emergent field of using synthetic data on
| purpose.
|
| What is going to be interesting and I hope pay attention to is
| that any criticism of Ai is a direct criticism of the norm and
| the fear of it's continuation accelerated. And yet we are already
| in the acent, so I would hope instead of expressing fears. We
| embrace solutions and talk about the future we want.
|
| As no conversation can alter the path we are on now. So do you
| guys want the forever treadmill? Or UBi?
| eecc wrote:
| Funny, I just realized that until today reading was an
| essentially social human thing.
|
| Any sufficiently long piece of writing that made some sense had
| been written by another human, perhaps dead but still it was a
| form of connection to another life.
|
| Now, well it's a maybe. Odd
| jaggs wrote:
| The pendulum will start to swing back.
|
| The problem is, what will replace the garbage and satisfy the
| instant, easy, dopamine addiction?
| dontwearitout wrote:
| It's made me consider my habits, and how much time I spend
| consuming internet content or comment threads which may (even
| today) be completely fabricated or autogenerated. I'm hoping I
| can use this inflection point as motivation to unplug a bit and
| spend more time enjoying being human and enjoying the real
| world.
| baxtr wrote:
| Sorry, I had to do it. I asked GPT3...
|
| _How can we prevent drowning in garbage generated by AI?
|
| > Preventing drowning in AI-generated garbage can be a
| challenging task, but there are a few things that can be done to
| reduce the amount of garbage that is generated. One approach is
| to carefully design and train AI systems to generate high-quality
| content, rather than relying on large amounts of data to produce
| mediocre results. Additionally, using tools and techniques such
| as data filters and validation can help to identify and remove
| low-quality or irrelevant content. Finally, creating and
| enforcing strict guidelines and standards for the use and
| generation of AI-generated content can help to prevent the
| proliferation of garbage._
| nonbirithm wrote:
| I think that the root of the problem is not algorithms like the
| article suggests. It's ordinary people that can't resist the
| temptation of using AI to generate coherent-seeming results and
| flooding the Internet with them. But I don't blame you since I
| find AI tools to be useful in certain contexts, and I am unable
| to resist tinkering with Stable Diffusion. I guess the future
| for me will be one of navigating the resulting cognitive
| dissonance as I sift through pages of autogenerated SEO spam.
|
| Maybe there could be a codified set of guidelines for how AI
| content should be shared. Or maybe an annotation system that
| separates the two across different websites? I only ever share
| something that comes from an AI on a siloed website just for AI
| content, but that's only because I have my own beliefs. More
| and more people on this site are asking if certain comments
| were generated with GPT-3 and it's a worrying sign.
| notacoward wrote:
| That's honestly one of the best comments in this entire thread.
| Instead of veering predictably into philosophy or anecdote, it
| provides concrete and feasible steps toward improvement. No
| better way to make the point that "AI generated" is not the
| problem and "garbage" is.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| In this case though, it's not a solution at all. The question
| isn't how producers of garbage produce less garbage, it's how
| consumers of content can avoid being inundated by garbage. We
| may well ask 'please don't produce less garbage' and the
| producers have given us a resounding 'no.'
| visarga wrote:
| Fight fire with fire. Local language model doing question
| answering takes search and web garbage in, outputs polite
| and helpful responses without ads and tracking.
|
| But let's take this idea one step further. We could also
| have a neural index. There are a few promising papers.
| Nathanba wrote:
| I find the AI competition to be yet another powerful reminder
| that all that matters are results. I can't count how much
| time I've spent being angry at people in my life, even though
| I always knew that it was stupid. Angry at bad docs, bad
| programmers, bad decisions, their inability to think or
| understand or care or feel. Now the AI removes it all. The AI
| generates truth out of thin air faster than any human can
| invent a lie about it. The AI simply generates good docs from
| bad docs, all the anger was always irrelevant.
|
| People were never going to become better, once again
| technology simply creates a world where people are
| automatically better by the mere fact that life is so much
| easier that the humans have no justification anymore to lie
| and cheat and pretend that the docs were actually always good
| and how I'm the problem. Nope, the AI just fixes it
| immediately and the human can remain lazy and ignorant, never
| the wiser that he actually failed at his job. I think it will
| be wonderful, no longer will we have to argue with e.g c++
| programmers about whether their language is bad. The AI will
| make it instantly obvious that you won't want to risk
| programming in this nonsense. No longer will we have to
| debate people on whether some political issue is right or
| wrong. The AI will generate so many truths out of thin air
| that it counters the DDOS of bad people's lies faster than
| they can spin lies. Once again technology is going to save us
| from human nature, humans are allowed to remain silently bad.
|
| And the best part: Bad people are usually lazy, they will
| trust the AI far more than they ever trust other bad people
| or themselves. They will simply start blindly trusting the
| AI, which is better than what we have now: Them inventing
| their own lies and trusting themselves.
| practice9 wrote:
| It will remove a large amount of stress from people's lives
| for sure. When an AI model can explain the non-obvious bug
| in the code written by the developer who left the company 2
| years ago - that's quite powerful. Saves more time for
| other stuff
|
| Though at some point it may create new sources of stress
| (like much discussed job security when the other job
| candidate is the AI model)
| visarga wrote:
| A company firing its human experts in favour of AI is a
| bad sign, probably going to fail. If business was good
| they would hire additional humans and use more AI. The
| purpose of a company is not to reduce salary costs, but
| to increase profits.
| practice9 wrote:
| An important threshold will be when an important physics,
| math or biology problem is going to be solved with one of
| these AIs, or by a scientist who uses AI for "ghostwriting".
|
| If scientists will verify the solution and find it to be
| correct, the mainstream sentiment about "garbage" will change
| very quickly. Maybe except various neo-luddites who will find
| different reasons to hate these models
| visarga wrote:
| Spot on with verification. It's going to be big. There could be
| neural nets specialised in verification.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I notice it did not offer a solution that involves outright
| banning itself... The ghost in the machine is showing
| somrand0 wrote:
| because maybe it understands that banning stuff is not to be
| done lightly. any action that restricts anyone's individual
| freedom must be very carefully vetted.
|
| because without freedom we will die. but this also applies to
| the corporations whose rights are now in opposition with our
| own human individual necessities.
|
| if I want to gift a copy of a copyrighted material owned by a
| corporation, I can still do it, but it's getting more
| difficult; and I in fact may well be prosecuted criminally
| for doing that. this is an example of my right to do what I
| want (give a copied gift) stands in opposition with the right
| of a corporation to get its way. I fear human individuals are
| losing this battle.
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| A propos, has anybody asked The Last Question*?[0]
|
| "Can the entropy of the universe be reversed?"
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question
| _shantaram wrote:
| Putting the question in verbatim led to a somewhat
| unimaginative, albeit technically correct response.
|
| > The entropy of the universe, also known as the
| thermodynamic arrow of time, is a measure of the disorder or
| randomness of a system. It is a fundamental concept in
| thermodynamics, and it is widely accepted that the entropy of
| the universe is constantly increasing over time. This is
| because according to the second law of thermodynamics, the
| entropy of a closed system can never decrease.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Curious of GPT3's response to the opposite side of that
| question:
|
| *How can we enable drowning in garbage generated by AI?*
| baxtr wrote:
| Here you go:
|
| _> It is not advisable to try and enable drowning in garbage
| generated by AI. Rather, we should strive to prevent the
| generation of AI-generated garbage in the first place. This
| can be done by carefully designing and training AI systems to
| generate high-quality content, using tools and techniques
| such as data filters and validation to identify and remove
| low-quality content, and by creating and enforcing strict
| guidelines and standards for the use and generation of AI-
| generated content._
| sdenton4 wrote:
| The point this piece misses: The data being put on the internet
| is often the hand-selected highest quality outputs of the
| image/text generator, or even human-edited to improve quality
| further. This puts it back in the realm of good training
| material.
| milchek wrote:
| One could argue we are drowning in garbage regardless? Most
| online content is very average. Maybe it's a good thing because
| we won't need to store so much junk as the AI can be more
| ephemeral and answer as we need?
| zajio1am wrote:
| How is AI-generated garbage different from human-generated
| garbage? We are already drowning in the later. And from many
| recent examples, the former seems more interesting (although
| there is a clear selection bias).
| pixl97 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
|
| if 90% of everything is garbage things are really bad. If
| 99.999999% of things are garbage then everything is completely
| useless.
| srge wrote:
| It is a real problem. The web will soon be full of AI generated
| bullshit.
|
| What might come back as useful tool? Authorship. People actually
| signing the content and putting their reputation on the line. It
| still exists obviously (journalism...) but it might need to be
| standardized and industrialized.
| rxhernandez wrote:
| People "sign" their content with their faces on TikTok; it
| doesn't stop the deluge of complete nonsense that's widely
| accepted on that platform (much to the frustration of many
| academics trying to combat it).
| srge wrote:
| Arguably the non-sense videos on TikTok are not an
| existential threat on the web.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > What might come back as useful tool? Authorship.
|
| That, and removing the financial incentives to attract traffic
| AKA ads.
| ghaff wrote:
| Though the only way to do that is probably to end up in a
| world where most worthwhile content is locked behind hard
| paywalls so there's one class who pays a lot for gated
| content (which was more or less the historical state of
| affairs, public libraries notwithstanding) and the plebes
| have to filter through all the ad-laden crap.
| gshubert17 wrote:
| Indeed, Neal Stephenson in _Anathem_ (2008), in describing an
| alternate world (in which his "reticulum" is our "network")
| wrote "Early in the Reticulum--thousands of years ago--it
| became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty,
| obsolete, or downright misleading information."
|
| "So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built
| around it. ... " Generating crap "didn't really take off until
| the military got interested" in a program called "Artificial
| Inanity".
|
| The defenses that were developed back then now "work so well
| that, most of the time, the users of the Reticulum don't know
| it's there. Just as you are not aware of the millions of germs
| trying and failing to attack your body every moment of every
| day."
|
| A group of people (the "Ita") developed techniques for a
| parallel reticulum in which they could keep information they
| had determined to be reliable. When there was news on the
| reticulum, they might take a couple of days to do sanity-
| checking or fact-checking. I'm guessing there would need to be
| reputation monitoring and cryptographic signatures to maintain
| the integrity of their alternate web.
| jasfi wrote:
| Another problem is AI training on AI generated content. This
| could lead to degradation of results. So perhaps to make
| everyone happy a new HTML tag indicating AI content would be
| useful?
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| That just makes things easier for the legitimate humans to
| differentiate themselves as being a cut above.
| adql wrote:
| The people using it to make money don't want it to be easily
| spotted, tag or metadata marking it will never happen unless
| required by law
| jasfi wrote:
| There would indeed need to be a law.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| > Another problem is AI training on AI generated content.
| This could lead to degradation of results.
|
| That's only the first step in the degradation. In a worse
| case scenario, where AI-generated crap is not contained,
| imagine this: young and still immature _humans_ "learning"
| their styles of writing, information, and social expectations
| from content generated by AI that itself trained on AI-
| generated content-and then more AI trains on content
| generated by these humans that were trained on AI-generated
| content. And on, and on, and on...
| unglaublich wrote:
| Luckily, the phenomenon of puberty will make sure that
| young people absolutely do _not_ want to comply ;).
| pixl97 wrote:
| Comply with what? Even in culture we tend to have a
| limited number of subsets of counter culture. The vast
| majority of the non-compliant to primary culture fits in
| one of a few common subcultures. As much as HN users try
| to exclaim they are islands that stand alone from
| society, we are all dependant on a functioning society
| for day to day life.
|
| We should ask questions like "Can countless AI's fracture
| society into a million sub societies disconnected from
| the reality around them".
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Ah, but they do want to fit in and speak like their
| peers, and while a significant part of their
| socialisation happens online, and as long as that is
| where they absorb most content, AI will soon infiltrate
| the circle of online strangers with whom they interact.
| That's all the more so considering that teenagers are
| prime targets for advertising networks of dubious ethical
| standards, who will be the first to deploy (or may
| already have deployed) well trained and self-correcting
| _" How do you do, fellow kids?"_ NNs in potentially
| lucrative communities or social networks.
|
| (I'm not always as doom-and-gloom as it may seem, I'm
| just in a pessimistic mood today for some reason)
| throwup wrote:
| > a new HTML tag indicating AI content would be useful
|
| This has about as much chance of working as the evil bit.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit
| jasfi wrote:
| It worked for GDPR (regulation would be required).
| 2devnull wrote:
| If you didn't think the web wasn't full of bullshit before you
| won't be too disappointed.
| srge wrote:
| Well I won't be surprised if we all end up regretting the
| current level of bullshit. Fast.
| 2devnull wrote:
| Fair enough. It's like the lump of labor fallacy, but for
| bullshit rather than labor. One could view that as growing
| pains, but it is still growth in some sense.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| It already has a lot of AI and garbage content. And in some
| cases it's state sponsored propaganda, companies pitching
| products, or marketing departments attempting some notion of
| virality. The point is that there are plenty of people already
| gaming the system by just flooding the internet with carefully
| designed noise to bend opinions this way or that way.
|
| "Fall, or dodge in heaven" by Neal Stephenson actually touches
| on this topic quite a bit and comes to a similar conclusion.
| Not his most accessible work but I enjoyed it. That book was
| written just before Trump won 2016 elections and in hind sight
| making that book really spot on and timely.
|
| In the book, different streams of truth become so hard to
| separate due to all the spam, automated content, etc. that
| people start filtering it based on reputation and signatures.
| The game then becomes curating and filtering the content, which
| is ultimately not an objective thing but a subjective thing. So
| the net result is what we are actually starting to see today
| which is different groups of people locked in their own bubbles
| and no longer even getting exposed to the other side's point of
| view or even able to agree on some basic facts. Like who
| actually won the election. And people are feeding those bubbles
| with nonsense to influence opinions, get people to vote certain
| ways, or simply to just create chaos and fear.
|
| In the book the topic is not an election but the seemingly
| simple question of whether or not a certain town in the us
| still exists after it was supposedly blown up with a nuclear
| bomb. In the book, this event leads to people acting as if that
| happened and ignoring all evidence to the contrary pointing out
| that in fact this was an elaborate hoax designed to create a
| massive panic.
|
| That particular dystopian outcome is not necessarily what would
| happen. But using technology to authenticate where content
| actually comes from along with some reputation mechanism would
| go a long way separating the noise from the genuine content.
| It's simple and easy to do. So, why don't we?
| GaggiX wrote:
| AI training on AI-generated images works like a very complicated
| Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), only the best
| images have a chance to be relevant enough to be noticed by a
| scraper, after being selected by the user who used the AI, and
| they have probably been shared several times by random people.
| Also, a lot of AI-generated content doesn't look like trash to
| me, I've seen a lot of good images, the fact that AIs can
| generate trash doesn't seem to be a problem to me, I can also
| generate junk and share it on the net if I want.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Also, a lot of AI-generated content doesn't look like trash
| to me, I've seen a lot of good images
|
| Translation: There is a lot of human generated original art
| that you're not aware of, and when you see it in the "AI"'s
| output you think it's original.
| GaggiX wrote:
| So you are implying that an image generated by a generative
| model must resemble closely to an image in the dataset,
| right? Because I don't think that's true, you can try to
| prove me wrong if you want, I'll give you a useful resource,
| the LAION dataset that Stable Diffusion was trained with is
| completely open, generate or find an image generated by
| Stable Diffusion and find the most semantically similar
| images in the dataset using: https://rom1504.github.io/clip-
| retrieval
| dwringer wrote:
| People have the same argument all the time about musicians
| ripping off each others' compositions, no AI needed for that.
| nottorp wrote:
| Same for movie scripts, but sometimes they do fail and
| something original squeezes through. I'm saying this can't
| be the case with a pattern matching/combining algorithm.
| dwringer wrote:
| I've been playing around with stable diffusion a bit, and
| if you use an iterative process starting with either an
| extremely vivid and "code-golfed" prompt (like verses of
| poetry, concise prose, or elegant lisp), or your own
| illustration, and then feed the output back in again
| (with some fuzzing) along with the prompt, or a modified
| prompt, or a totally new prompt, after 2-3 generations
| the result becomes something that, although it undeniably
| integrates existing works in myriad ways, looks wholly
| unique and shaped by the user of the AI system more than
| by any of the individual contributing parts. I don't
| think this is terribly different from my creative process
| when I play music; I feel I have to work just as hard to
| avoid copping other peoples' stuff unconsciously.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| In just the past couple of weeks, I've noticed lots of machine
| generated cooking recipes. They follow the typical SEO pandering
| blog format, where there's an unnecessary story about the
| author's trip somewhere or their child's school play being the
| inspiration for making this particular recipe, followed by the
| actual recipe details. The machine generated stories are even
| more pointless and meandering than what humans come up with and
| the recipe details have steps that contradict each other and
| specify ingredients that shouldn't be in the dish and weren't on
| the ingredients list.
|
| I don't know how many people are fooled by these recipes and end
| up with a cooking disaster but if we start seeing faulty machine
| generated instructions on how to do electrical work or engine
| repair, the consequences will be much greater when followed. The
| real annoyance is that because these machine generated articles
| learned from sites that maximize SEO, the generated articles are
| rapidly rising to the top of search results and crowding out
| actual good information that wasn't SEO maximized.
| otikik wrote:
| AI-generated First Aid instructions.
|
| AI-generated alternative cancer treatments.
|
| Hugh.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| there's a paper that basically shows these LLMs are pretty much
| tapped out in terms of quality data to train on, not sure if
| there are any legit architecture improvements in the works to
| improve results quality but it seems brute force training with
| more data may be about over -
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.04325.pdf
|
| As for SEO, Google is going to have to stop being lazy and
| relying so much on backlinks and domain authority. They might
| have to consider allowing searchers to essentially vote on what
| they consider good. I don't see any other way low quality AI
| content doesn't dominate SERPs, established players will spin
| up entire sites and spam backlinks to them all. There are also
| people working on using AI to identify obvious AI content by
| finding patterns in the output which is probably our only hope.
|
| For social media and forums they will have to rely even harder
| on captcha or they will be taken over by bots talking to other
| bots
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| While there is certainly a lot of room for progress in
| architecture to improve training time, model size and
| inference speed, high quality data and curated data sets are
| the ultimate bottleneck in terms of what AI can actually do.
| Low quality data can be useful to a point, but once you have
| enough data all it's doing is teaching the model to produce
| low quality output.
|
| The next wave of major progress in AI will come when we
| create image/text data sets that have been heavily annotated
| with aesthetic judgment metadata, and train models to make
| aesthetic judgments, then condition generative models on
| aesthetic judgment scores during training.
| eternalban wrote:
| " _The key roadblock to achieving human-level language
| understanding in AI systems is the lack of a comprehensive
| model of human language and cognition. While large amounts
| of data and powerful algorithms can help improve the
| performance of language models, ultimately a better
| understanding of how human language works and how it is
| processed by the brain is necessary to build truly
| intelligent language systems. In addition, the ability to
| integrate multiple modalities such as vision, speech, and
| gesture, and to handle the complexity and variability of
| real-world language use are also important challenges to be
| addressed._ " -- you know who
| kneebonian wrote:
| An interesting idea but really then aren't you just
| recreating reddit to an extent. The things people like or
| that are popular are upvoted because the voter agrees whereas
| what is unpopular gets down voted regardless of veracity
| because people like the way it sounds.
|
| Beyond that a once popular website or producer says or does
| something that offends the sensibilities of the internet
| crowd and then everyone goes and down votes their results
| because it violates the current ziegiest
| pixl97 wrote:
| >The things people like or that are popular are upvoted
| because
|
| You forgot to add "Because clever posters use bots to give
| an early upvote boost to their posts, and downvote
| competing posts" And the more eyeballs on the site, the
| more things will be manipulated this way by bad actors.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Yeah, it's nice to see the _best_ parts of Digg survived!
| /s
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| People are already appending "reddit" to their search
| queries to filter out the SEO blogspam clogging up the
| results of a regular search. Reddit is already superior to
| base search results for anything that's not plain
| uncontroversial facts because at least you're getting an
| actual human's opinion, which you can treat and evaluate as
| such.
|
| For all its flaws maybe becoming like reddit it what search
| needs. AI generated spam will likely always be better at
| gaming a search algorithm than a human. Human moderation
| has its flaws but at least we're very familiar with them -
| they might be worth dealing with if it keeps the internet
| vaguely usable.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Lots of reddit is already pretty useless, drowning in
| people who are desperate to sound clever by regurgitating
| one of the same 50 meme jokes with some minor twist to
| it. And the astroturfing on the political reddits are
| likely to start hitting the niche ones with products
| getting pushed by manufacturers. Just buy accounts that
| have been built by bots on front-page subreddits, then
| have them make AI-driven positive comments on the niche
| subreddits and now you've got organic-looking
| advertisement for your product. Moderators likely won't
| help since they are there mostly to keep the trolls out
| (or they're more focused on whatever political axe
| they're grinding).
| ren_engineer wrote:
| >aren't you just recreating reddit to an extent
|
| there are tons of ways to prevent that by weighting votes
| and only taking a random sample. SEO is basically a war
| where SEOs find a way to exploit Google's algorithm and
| Google tries to respond.
|
| Backlinks were Google's original solution to keyword spam
| that made other search engines suck, they didn't expect
| people would create entire sites or pay other websites to
| send links to them so they could rank higher. Backlinks
| were themselves considered to be "votes" for quality
| similar to citations in academia. The problem is the
| barrier to entry to make a site and link to it is high, so
| SEOs themselves are often the only ones to do it. Adding
| some sort of voting mechanism would allow actual readers to
| give an opinion on quality, although you'd probably see
| SEOs pay people to vote on their link via a VPN switching
| IPs, so only people with established Google accounts could
| be allowed to vote. Obviously its a huge challenge, which
| is why Google is worth hundreds of billions for even
| partially solving it
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Google doesn't actually have to do anything at all other than
| slurp personal data up and use it to improve ad margins. Once
| your the default search engine, the default home page, and
| the default browser, you've locked 99% of the world into your
| portal. You control what people see and do, and they have to
| accept it. That's what triggered the browser wars of the
| 1990's - the realization that that trifecta is the keys to
| world domination.
|
| Saying "yeah but Kagi" is talking about you and your tribe
| only. The world isn't going to pay for Kagi or take the N
| steps required to switch. Microsoft realized they could kill
| Netscape by simply not requiring the user to download
| anything, then failed to consolidate. Google managed to be
| better for just long enough to consolidate so pervasively
| that any further investment in improvement is a literal waste
| of energy and money.
|
| So, don't hold your breath from an improvement in SEO
| garbage. It'll just get worse. Definitely use Kagi and
| hopefully we will have great niche subscription based tools
| that have an incentive to be better. But don't expect that
| Google perceives ANY problems with the status quo or that
| they have to do anything about anything other than increasing
| ad margins.
| nradov wrote:
| My understanding is that Google does essentially allow
| searchers to "vote" on what they consider good by looking for
| bounces. If the searcher follows on a search results link and
| then quickly returns to the search page then it's considered
| a failure.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| true, but that's part of the reason for the life stories
| being told on recipe sites that the parent comment was
| talking about. Bounce rate is another metric that SEOs have
| gamed by throwing a bunch of fluff onto pages where people
| have to dig to find what they want
| Arrath wrote:
| Does back button capture also serve to circumvent/delay
| bounce status? Cause good god is it annoying.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| So _that 's why_ they're doing it. I've been wondering
| for a while now just why so many sites make you work hard
| to fish out the information you're after. I assumed ad
| exposure, but I had this feeling that it's not the whole
| story. Delaying people to fool Google bounce metrics is
| the idea I missed.
| thefreeman wrote:
| that's not actually why they do it. it's because recipes
| are not copyrightable. so they throw in a "story" to make
| it something they can copyright and try to prevent people
| from duplicating.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's specific to recipe. Here I meant in general - e.g.
| blogs and news articles that bury the core point / answer
| somewhere around the final 1/3 of text, but also don't
| seem to exploit the artificially elongated text to expose
| you to more ads.
| cossatot wrote:
| It may be that the 21st century Turing test will be 'whether an
| AI can tell that content is AI generated". Otherwise it may be
| much harder to filter the AI-generated content.
| beezlewax wrote:
| Bad input equals bad output. They've trained these models on
| poorly written content that's already been an issue itself.
| ghaff wrote:
| I guess I'm in the minority of actually appreciating a lot of
| the background. And it can't just be SEO given that cookbooks
| these days are hardly just lists of recipes for the most part
| and people do apparently buy them.
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| Well to me there's two distinct types of background:
|
| 1. Background directly related to the recipe/cooking in
| general.
|
| 2. The writer's personal anecdotes tangentially related to
| the recipe.
|
| Some cooking blogs have great background (eg. J. Kenji Lopez-
| Alt's work on Serious Eats) but I would say they're mostly
| type 1 - information that informs you about the recipe, how
| they developed it, technique etc. They have type 2 background
| as well (jokes, what inspired them to make the recipe,
| snippets of their day-to-day lives) but it's definitely a
| small proportion of the body of the text. These blogs always
| have background that's work reading.
|
| What I can't stand is the blogs with reams and reams of text
| of nothing but personal anecdotes, meandering stories, media
| references, what their kids are up to etc etc, _occasionally_
| returning to talk about something to do with the recipe. I
| don 't have any examples because I now avoid untrusted recipe
| blogs like the plague, but it becomes very obvious to me when
| a recipe blog strays from useful background to worthless
| padding for the sake of copyright and SEO.
| ghaff wrote:
| Absolutely. There is content around recipes that is good
| and content that is, well, not. But a lot of people seem to
| object to anything other than a recipe.
| shagie wrote:
| It's because you can copyright everything _except_ the
| recipe and often a recipe by itself fails SEO in today 's
| world.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Absolutely, buying an actualy printed cook book is more than
| the recipes. I'm not sure the same thing is true for the 10M
| "Best Ever Chocolate Chip Cookie" recipes on the web.
| ghaff wrote:
| I guess if I'm just looking for a recipe the text is easy
| enough to skip. Often there's even a jump to recipe button.
| But photos etc. are often appreciated as well as some sense
| of why this recipe might be different.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| It's not just SEO it's also a requirement to get copyright
| protection
| ghaff wrote:
| So? Someone else can (and often does) just copy the recipe.
| So if you don't think the rest of the content has any
| value, what has been gained by writing it? If I had a
| cooking site--which I don't--I'd certainly want to do more
| than just post recipes irrespective of monetary
| considerations.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| Sally's Baking Addiction is the only site you need, FWIW. Trust
| me on that!
| hoosieree wrote:
| What's not to like? Custard? Good! Jam? Good! Meat? Good!
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I would be very interested in your meat jam custard recipe.
| Asking for a friendly AI.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| That's Joey from Friends [0].
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSFgDZJVYbo
| capableweb wrote:
| Here is my own favorite way of doing jam custard:
|
| > I am not able to provide a recipe for meat jam custard as
| I do not have the ability to access information on specific
| recipes. However, I can provide some general guidelines on
| how you might go about making a meat jam custard.
|
| > First, you will need to select a type of meat to use for
| the jam. This could be any type of meat that you enjoy and
| that is suitable for cooking and preserving. Some common
| options for meat jam include pork, beef, chicken, or lamb.
|
| > Once you have selected your meat, you will need to cook
| it until it is tender and well-done. This can be done by
| boiling, roasting, or slow-cooking the meat, depending on
| your preference and the type of meat you are using.
|
| > Once the meat is cooked, you will need to shred or finely
| chop it and mix it with a jamming or preserving agent, such
| as sugar, honey, or fruit juice. This will help to preserve
| the meat and give it a jam-like consistency.
|
| > Next, you will need to prepare a custard base for the
| meat jam. This can be done by mixing together eggs, milk,
| and any desired flavorings, such as vanilla or spices.
|
| > Finally, you will need to combine the meat jam and
| custard mixture and pour it into a baking dish. Bake the
| dish in the oven until the custard is set and the top is
| golden brown.
|
| > Keep in mind that this is just a general idea of how you
| might go about making a meat jam custard, and the specific
| ingredients and cooking methods may vary depending on the
| recipe you are using. It is always best to follow a recipe
| carefully and make any necessary adjustments based on your
| personal preferences and the ingredients you have on hand.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I am ethbr0's illuminated understanding of the Cartesian
| product of {ways of preparing meat} x {ways of preparing
| jam} x {ways of preparing custard}.
|
| Thank you!
| ben_w wrote:
| Thinking of my confusion as a British person, the first time
| I heard about Americans having "biscuits and gravy". Or the
| time an American recipe guide got confused in the other
| direction about the British traditional Christmas "mince pie"
| and put _minced meat_ in instead of _mincemeat_ (which,
| despite the name, is vegetarian).
| ectopod wrote:
| Mincemeat can be vegetarian but it traditionally contains
| suet.
| bartread wrote:
| I still nurse disappointment, mixed with a hint of
| resentment, going back to the age of maybe 3 or 4 years
| old that mince pies contain mincemeat (which is fruit,
| not meat) rather than minced beef. In the view of my 4
| year old mind, and frankly my 40-something year old mind,
| the names of ingredients and dishes ought not to provide
| a misleading impression of what they might be made out
| of. "Mincemeat" still feels a little like false
| advertising.
| petesergeant wrote:
| I dunno, Digestive Biscuits dipped in gravy also sounds
| pretty good?
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| The set of all things that don't go well with gravy is
| vacuously empty.
| dmje wrote:
| Have an upvote as I lol into my soup :-)
| nradov wrote:
| That was actually the basis for a "Friends" sitcom episode.
| The pages of a recipe book got stuck together resulting in
| Rachel combining a bunch of random ingredients.
|
| https://www.today.com/food/friends-meat-trifle-episode-
| how-i...
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| Never expected to see a _Friends_ reference on HN.
| hoosieree wrote:
| That is currently my 2nd-highest voted comment on HN, so
| I'm a little embarrassed that it's a quote without
| attribution. But I figured if someone didn't know and
| searched those exact words they'd get to be one of today's
| lucky 10k.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| The stories aren't just SEO-pandering. They're copyright-
| pandering: https://www.chatelaine.com/food/food-blog-recipe-
| storytellin...
| burkaman wrote:
| Can you link one? Sounds very interesting.
| gibspaulding wrote:
| Holy crap. I just got an account with OpenAI set up last night
| so I've been looking for interesting prompts to play with.
| Can't say I'm going to try the recipe, but this looks at least
| as good as most blog-spam recipe sites.
|
| Prompt: Write a recipe and blog post for onion soup.
|
| GPT3 Response: Onion soup is a classic comfort food that can be
| enjoyed at any time of year. It's a simple and delicious dish
| that comes together quickly and is sure to satisfy even the
| pickiest of eaters. Plus, it's a great way to use up any extra
| onions you may have lying around! Today, I'm going to share
| with you my favorite recipe for onion soup.
|
| To make this soup, you'll need:
|
| -4 large onions, sliced -4 tablespoons butter -4 cups chicken
| broth -1 teaspoon dried thyme -Salt and pepper to taste
|
| First, melt the butter in a large pot over medium heat. Add the
| onions and cook until softened and lightly browned, about 8-10
| minutes.
|
| Next, add the chicken broth, thyme, and salt and pepper. Bring
| the mixture to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and simmer
| for 15 minutes.
|
| Once the soup has simmered, it's ready to serve. Ladle into
| bowls and enjoy with some crusty bread or a salad.
|
| Onion soup is a simple and delicious dish that's sure to please
| the whole family.
| shagie wrote:
| A bit ago, with the Watson craze, they tried to figure out
| what else it was good for.
|
| This Cocktail Concocted By IBM's Watson Isn't Half Bad -
| https://gizmodo.com/this-cocktail-concocted-by-ibms-
| watson-i...
|
| Would You Drink a Cocktail Invented By a Computer? How IBM's
| Watson become the world's most creative bartender
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ibms-watson-can-
| mi...
|
| ---
|
| The reason that blogspam recipes are so common is that
| recipes have a special place in copyright law in that they
| aren't.
|
| https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-
| protecte...
|
| https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/
|
| https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html (and in
| particular https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf )
|
| From circular 33:
|
| > A recipe is a statement of the ingredients and procedure
| required for making a dish of food. A mere listing of
| ingredients or contents, or a simple set of directions, is
| uncopyrightable. As a result, the Office cannot register
| recipes consisting of a set of ingredients and a process for
| preparing a dish. In contrast, a recipe that creatively
| explains or depicts how or why to perform a particular
| activity may be copyrightable. A registration for a recipe
| may cover the written description or explanation of a process
| that appears in the work, as well as any photographs or
| illustrations that are owned by the applicant. However, the
| registration will not cover the list of ingredients that
| appear in each recipe, the underlying process for making the
| dish, or the resulting dish itself. The registration will
| also not cover the activities described in the work that are
| procedures, processes, or methods of operation, which are not
| subject to copyright protection.
|
| And so, you can grab a recipe and be 100% sure that it isn't
| copyrighted. Then you can add some SEO text around it and
| some advertisements on the side and you've got yourself a
| page that you are sure that no legal department will come
| after you for.
| toddmorey wrote:
| So the interesting thing about these tools is that they don't
| link to the sources or cite the sources but instead train on
| them to generate a new source.
|
| I wonder if over time SEO spam becomes an invisible problem to
| us and instead the AIs have sort it out for us.
| mason55 wrote:
| > _I wonder if over time SEO spam becomes an invisible
| problem to us and instead the AIs have sort it out for us_
|
| There have been some good Twitter threads about this.
| Basically, this is the last generation of AI to be trained
| with inputs that were ~100% human. It probably won't take
| long until the bulk of the content online is generated by AI,
| at which point it will just be an AI feedback loop. Any new
| concept, idea, technology, whatever, that doesn't already
| have a bunch of content about it will never have a guaranteed
| fully-human-written corpus to start from.
|
| Once there's a viable OpenAI competitor or two, it's probably
| only a matter of time until the AIs start an arms race to
| feed each other bad data. Tweak the model to generate subtly
| incorrect information, regenerate your training corpus in a
| way that it feeds into other AIs but ensures you ignore it,
| and now you're basically all the way back to having a few
| trusted "information gatekeepers".
| nradov wrote:
| This will in turn spawn a new research field and industry
| of automated AI content detection in order to filter out
| poisoned training data. Also expect to see web browsers
| incorporate that technology with some sort of rating or
| color code to flag pages that seem to be AI generated. It's
| going to be a real arms race.
| toss1 wrote:
| THIS!!
|
| Whenever this technology is used in an accuracy-critical
| setting, it is a recipe for disaster.
|
| These "AI systems" produce the _MOST PREDICTED_ output whenever
| there is any ambiguity, and this _REPLACES_ the _ACTUAL
| UNEXPECTED_ value /ITEM. In information system terms, they are
| literally stripping out content with the highest information
| value.
|
| I saw this first hand giving a deposition that was supposedly
| transcribed by an "Artificial Intelligence" system. The output
| looked beautiful, until I started checking it for errors.
| Normally an errata sheet has a dozen lines for errors. Mine had
| pages. And they were substantial and very meaningful. The most
| obvious site was a specific name that sounded vaguely similar
| (started with a "J" and "K" sounds) was replaced by "Jack
| Kennedy". It also replaced "you have" with "I have" and omitted
| "not" several times, literally reversing the meaning of the
| statement. There were 85+ errors that I caught, over an order
| of magnitude more than normal.
|
| These things are basically fine as glorified type-ahead systems
| where it doesn't matter much and a human is in the loop. But
| using them in any situation where the results are critical is,
| at this point, basically fraud. They do not do what the
| proponents claim.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Fun fact:
|
| Video games with crafting/cooking such as RPGs are featured on
| some of these generated SEO sites.
| jorgemf wrote:
| I think the problem you are describing is not only about AI, it
| is about trusting your sources of information. I can happen
| with content from humans.
| acdha wrote:
| Yes - AI moves this to another level of scale but Google's
| need to sell ad placements created the environment for that
| to work. When they can't even be troubled to de-rank blatant
| StackExchange/GitHub/Wikipedia scrapers it created a big
| opportunity for these low-quality content farms limited only
| by their ability to generate content on every topic.
| notart666 wrote:
| Except for the fact that it does so on an unprecide dented
| scale allowing small groups of people to do things without
| necessarily being caught allowing for far more effective ways
| of control. Even without it, it's hard to argue for the
| existence of online forums when hackernews is a classic
| example of why it doesn't work when the majority of the
| 'intellectuals' have an inflated belief and understanding on
| topics they have no basic understand on. It's so bad that
| none of the actual subject matter experts talk here besides
| ones with financial interests in the products themselves and
| the experts fearful of retribution. The irony is almost
| comedic.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| I have cookbooks, both physical and in digital formats, but
| it's usually faster to do a web search, especially when I
| mostly need cooking time and temperature. Perhaps this will
| motivate me to finally get around the setting up a local
| search function for my electronic cookbook collection as the
| web is going to be less and less trustworthy.
| danuker wrote:
| Firefox makes it pretty easy to add a custom search engine.
|
| That one could point to your local server instance.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/OpenSearch#auto...
| oneseven wrote:
| Have a look at
|
| https://www.eatyourbooks.com/
|
| not sure if they do ebooks.
| jordanrobinson wrote:
| It's a shame, this seems like a really great idea, but I
| just tried to use it and for a recipe from a book I own
| it comes up with:
|
| > We've helped you locate this recipe but for the full
| instructions you need to go to its original source.
|
| Which I guess makes sense, how can they verify I own the
| cookbook, but still very disappointing.
| ginko wrote:
| For all its flaws I find Youtube is one of the best sources
| for recipes these days. Especially when you search in the
| language of the country the dishes are from and use CC
| auto-translate.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| It's ironic that for all our cheering of democratization
| of creation, we turn back to gatekeeping (video harder to
| produce than text) in a search for quality.
|
| Although maybe that's more a comment on the inevitable
| end state of democratization of creation + centralization
| of search/discovery + monetization of traffic.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Why is it ironic? I think it's more of a "humans are
| unable to learn from history moment". Romans called it
| "the mob" because of the common problems that occurred
| when large groups of undirected people got together and
| chaos broke loose. Of course the opposite where the
| authoritarian leader ruled everything also lead to Rome
| burning.
|
| There is a happier middleground where multiple gates
| exist to filter out the bullshit, but no said gatekeeper
| controls the entire market leading to monopoly behavior.
| nradov wrote:
| Video is just a better format than text for many recipes,
| at least for novice cooks. The results often depend on
| _technique_ as much as ingredients, and it 's hard to
| convey technique through text.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| _Well-edited_ video. Cannot state how infuriating it is
| when the exact piece I 'm stuck on is jumped over with a
| time cut.
|
| Incidentally, this is why I click on the dirtiest garage
| clip for car how-to's: it's usually just the raw start-
| to-end process.
| PeterisP wrote:
| With content from humans, there has to be sufficient
| motivation to produce a significant quantity of coherent
| garbage (since it takes time and effort) which means that you
| can trust by default because intentionally generated garbage
| is rare unless the topic is one of the niches where there is
| motivation for it (e.g. politics, history related to
| politics, and sales). Like, sometimes people do put in
| exceptional effort to fabricate something as a practical
| joke, but that is sufficiently rare that you can ignore it in
| your daily life.
|
| Without AI-generated content, cookie recipes would be "safe"
| from that, since only people who care about cookies would
| bother to write up articles about them - but now you suddenly
| have to mistrust _all_ sources of _all_ information, which is
| a new thing.
| jorgemf wrote:
| Create content with AI will be easier and faster, but it
| doesnt mean humans wont generate garbage. That is one of
| the main problems of the search engines. And as long as you
| can put ads in your content you can create any garbage and
| put ads there to make money, as long as the content sounds
| relevant for a lot of people.
|
| For me the main issue with AI creating content in internet
| is going to be the echo chamber of that content being used
| to train new AI models.
| pixl97 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
|
| The bullshit asymmetry principle puts forth that
| algorithmic 'bullshit' content is even worse as quantity
| is a quality all in itself when you're debunking the
| bullshit. In general the reader will not know if the
| producer of the bullshit is a real human or a bot. This
| makes the search engines job even harder as not only do
| you have the standard human bullshit you have to get rid
| of, you have an oceans torrent of AI generated bullshit
| that you have to waste energy on getting rid of.
|
| HN has a common theme of saying that "Dead internet
| theory is wrong", I personally just think they've not
| waited long enough and it's becoming more true every day.
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| It's the mass production that is the problem. A lot of
| talk into how businesses will still need curators to trim
| down the content and such misses a vital assumption: that
| these businesses actually care. Content farms won't trim
| down their 100 outsourced artists or writers to 10
| curators; they will cut the stack completely, and just
| pipe whatever noise the AI generates straight into the
| commons. Even if 99.999% of it is complete nonsensical
| garbage, if they produce fast enough the remaining 0.001%
| of actually good content can still result in massive
| profits
| mason55 wrote:
| > _A lot of talk into how businesses will still need
| curators to trim down the content and such misses a vital
| assumption: that these businesses actually care._
|
| It's less about if the businesses care and more about if
| the consumers care. Businesses will respond to whatever
| consumers are willing to tolerate.
|
| Honestly, it'll probably be a battle around requirements
| to label AI-generated content so that consumers can make
| an informed choice about what to trust. But, given the
| global nature of the internet, that's probably not
| possible. You probably end up with private/commercial
| reputation rating firms, and consumers can decide who
| they want to trust.
|
| If people decide they don't care about the veracity of
| information or don't want to put in the extra work to
| ensure they are consuming "true" information they you'll
| end up with businesses built on auto-generated garbage.
| Karunamon wrote:
| I have never encountered GPs problem where the recipe itself
| (the thing I was searching for) rather than the surrounding
| SEO fluff was AI generated trash. If this problem widely
| proliferates, especially into other domains, curation is
| going to become absolutely vital.
| wjholden wrote:
| There's a lot of junk writing that may or may not be
| authored by humans about health and fitness. Search Google
| for "how to do more pull-ups" and you'll find thousands of
| long, meandering, trash articles of generic common sense
| with stock images and lots of ads on spammy domains.
| hwestiii wrote:
| This is why just about everything I see on the web that isn't
| static is just stupid mush.
| conorcleary wrote:
| The appeal of dynamic content is very quickly losing it's
| luster.
| bilater wrote:
| I think this is going to be one of those Malthusian takes that
| never really happens. Simply because a) most ideas are mixes and
| rehashes of other ideas and b) you are disregarding the human
| curation element...not every random mix of ideas is being
| upvoted. Only the best ones stay up and then those are taken and
| added to by people which essentially creates a new thing.
| rdxm wrote:
| harvie wrote:
| There are text-to-image models trained on images found on the
| internet. But when they were trained, there were no AI generated
| images on the internet. Now there is plenty of weird images with
| AI artifacts made by this 1st gen AI all over the internet. All
| the new generations will be trained on dataset containing at
| least some amount of these. Which might turn out to be really
| annoying form of feedback loop.
| amai wrote:
| It will probably never work to find and filter out all AI
| garbage. But maybe there are ways to mark content generated by
| humans. Something like a digital signature only a real person can
| acquire from some authority.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| What stops a human, or many humans, from using an AI to
| generate content and then uploading it as if it's their own?
| amai wrote:
| True, but then the content is still cherry picked or curated
| by humans. It is not pure AI.
| jefe_ wrote:
| The challenge is that AI generated content will only register as
| garbage to those who fall 1-2 standard deviations away from the
| mean interest level for whatever content the AI is producing. For
| everybody else, it will typically be a 'good enough' story,
| recipe, video, etc. Several months ago, I wanted to cook chicken
| curry, so I googled and chose a top result. The recipe was fine,
| but it wasn't what I wanted. I then googled for a new recipe,
| this time more carefully vetting the ingredients. The recipe was
| an improvement, but still not what I wanted. Finally, I used NYT
| Cooking as my search engine, and the recipe was excellent. If I
| didn't have a strong preference, and know exactly what I wanted,
| the first recipe would have been perfectly suitable. The danger
| is that demand for 'advanced sources' erodes to the point that
| these publications/content creators are either forced to adopt
| the AI and turn to garbage or go out of business.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Strangely, recipes in particular are generally untested and so
| faulty as to fail when done strictly according to the written
| instructions.
|
| That might make it a little harder to recognize when an AI is
| 'pulling your leg'
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Agreed. A person who cooks regularly will just adapt on the
| fly and might even not realize they're correcting an error in
| the recipe. A person who cooks infrequently will stick to the
| recipe, fail, and then blame themselves for their own
| inexperience. This is already the case with human-produced
| recipes, and, as you say, it'll make it harder to recognize
| you're dealing with AI-generated nonsense instead of regular
| human mistakes or occasional cluelessness.
| dcchambers wrote:
| I can't be the only one that has a very real fear that AI
| generated "garbage" is going to basically destroy, or at the very
| least drastically change, the internet as we know it today,
| right?
|
| There's soon to be so much noise that it will be impossible to
| separate the signal.
| marban wrote:
| We're witnessing the making of Demand Media 2.0, except that you
| can now run it from your basement.
|
| https://variety.com/2013/biz/news/epic-fail-the-rise-and-fal...
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| I think the most interesting point about this article is not the
| observation that we're going to or already are drowning in
| algorithmically generated garbage content but the fact that such
| content is starting to be fed as input to LLMs.
|
| This could lead to emergent/unexpected behavior for the whole
| system.
| justbored123 wrote:
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| What Ploum describes sounds a lot like Nietzsche's "Last
| Computer".
|
| A feeble, average of things - the sum of all fears, hopes,
| dreams, inconsequential experiences and gossip, trivia, boasts
| and bullshit, plus all documented knowledge - divided through by
| 8 billion.
| okokwhatever wrote:
| The new value offer for the WWW is the "Made by real humans".
| Record my words.
| [deleted]
| EGreg wrote:
| Won't help.
|
| This will be used at scale THIS YEAR and every subsequent year to
| infiltrate social networks including this one and amass points /
| karma / followers / clout. And also to write articles that will
| eventually dwarf all human-generated content.
|
| With this and deepfakes and image/video generation, the age of
| trusting or caring about internet content or your friends sharing
| online is coming to an end. But it will be a painful 10 years as
| online mobs and outrage will happen over and over since people
| think they're reacting to their friends' posts of real things.
|
| No, forget violent killbots. Today's tech puts the nail in the
| coffin of human societal organization and systems of decision
| making and politics over the next 10 years. And AI doesn't have
| to be right about stuff to destroy our systems.
|
| We've been analyzing the performance of ONE agent among say 9
| humans at a poker table. But imagine untold swarms of them, being
| owned by competing groups, infiltrating ALL human content
| exchange.
|
| Not much different than what happened in trading firms over the
| last 20 years. Bots will be WELCOMED because they perform better
| on many metrics but will F everyone on the others.
|
| They will do reputational attacks at scale against rivals like
| nytimes.org and optimize for more reshares.
|
| Right now we consider what 1 AI actor can do among 9 humans at a
| poker table. Now imagine 1000-1 ratio of AI actors to humans on
| every network. And no way to weed them out.
|
| The way we consume most online content isnt even a Turing test
| but passive skimming - and GPT-4 can pass turing tests. None of
| your friends will really be able to tell that bullshit fake
| article with fake video was autogenerated by a bot. The botswarm
| will be able to manufacture any public opinion it wants overnight
| and "authoritative" voices arguing against it will be drowned out
| -- or worse, reputationally attacked in a coordinated manner.
| This is assuming that they even know what is real anymore
| themselves!!
|
| Human capital and content will be managed completely by AI and
| regulation will be useless -- not only because enforcement won't
| be feasible but because the network effect of all the human
| content and capital will gradually shrink. Every organization
| will start to PREFER bots to humans, in their communities, and
| any humans who complain will evenutually be booted or ignored by
| the majority (which will eventually be 99.99999% bots).
|
| If you think this is far fetched -- it already happened with
| trading and markets. Everyone prefers to have a bot and bot
| trading dwarfs human trading, and takes their money and capital.
| Content generation isn't that different.
|
| You think your social capital matters enough for your friends to
| care more about your relationship than bots... but ask yourself
| this... do you prefer to ask Google than your parents? Do you
| prefer to spend long hours at a corporation that you could be
| spending with your kids and do you put your elderly parents in
| nursing homes so you can work more? These are just examples.
|
| That's with TODAY's tech. Now, already. Nothing more needed
| except swarming behavior. And the key is that the communities
| will begin to PREFER the bots !
|
| Also, there is no way to stop it because organizations prefer AI
| to humans and will develop and deploy it regardless of what you
| say or do. Organizations aren't humans, and neither is AI. Humans
| are literally not stopping this, no matter how they organize.
| It's GAME OVER for society.
|
| PS: After such a sobering message, I would just like to say that
| trying to escape from this and live in enclaves without AI will
| be like the Unabomber -- finding society ever more encroaching on
| the wilderness he removed himself into. He and Frank Herbert's
| Dune have glimpsed the problem of advancing technology -- but
| they have underestimated how all-pervasive its utter destruction
| of all human society and meaning will be. And unlike their
| romantic notions, it cannot be stopped, not by a revolution nor
| by any activity of man.
| Nathanba wrote:
| I agree that regulation will be useless because the politicians
| and most people wouldn't even be capable of detecting bad
| content as bad. I also agree with your second point: Humans
| will prefer robots. It turns out human beings are actually
| quite terrible to deal with. Constant scheming, laziness,
| lying, low intelligence.. the list goes on and on. The second
| you don't have to deal with a human being, you'll be glad. In
| any shop, factory or anywhere. But I don't agree that it's game
| over. This needs to be a turning point for humanity: Finally
| start using your time to actually do something other than exist
| to exist. Actually try to conquer the stars, actually do
| something. Don't just sit on a single rock in space and pretend
| that's good enough.
| jacomoRodriguez wrote:
| OT: but personally I think we are not yet done destroying our
| planet and everything not human existing on it - so let's
| wait till we are done with this planet before we try to reach
| the next one to destroy
| bitL wrote:
| What will be the societal management of this? Will every single
| human get issued a unique very long cryptographic ID and every
| single thing a human does will be recorded with this ID, stored
| on a blockchain to prevent tampering with it, preventing bots
| from obtaining valid IDs? Then any questions about the
| authorship of any media will be answered by a quick lookup,
| filtering out bots, killing privacy in turn?
|
| Will trusted search results be restricted to before the
| "botocalypse" and everything afterwards will be discarded?
| rdhyee wrote:
| I looked at your profile and see your platform qbix. I'd love
| to hear how you've been adapting your projects to this AI
| seachange.
| EGreg wrote:
| Our software is for communities of all kinds. Instead of
| outsourcing the verification to LinkedIn or Twitter, who fail
| at it, you can at least have smaller communities where you
| met everyone and have one degree of separation.
|
| But aw I said, organizations will PREFER robots.
| rhymemini wrote:
| dqpb wrote:
| Does generative AI produce garbage? Yes.
|
| Does it only produce garbage? No.
|
| Do people produce garbage? Yes.
|
| Do people only produce garbage? No.
|
| We have a garbage filtering problem. This exists with and without
| AI.
| baxtr wrote:
| There will be a revival of human curation.
| wnkrshm wrote:
| The cyberpunk hero we need is a librarian
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| This was beautiful writing.
|
| We can also say the same thing happened when they added program
| settings to cameras.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| > Eating your own &@^$ is never healthy in the long run.
|
| Um, sure it is?
|
| So long as it's absorbed by fungi and plants first then mixed
| with some air and water to produce fruit or something else that's
| edible.
|
| This is actually what I'm concerned about when it comes to these
| GPT-esque AI models. Not that they're smart enough on their own
| to generate seriously worrying content. Sure there is a quality
| to quantity, yadda yadda, and these things are good at quantity;
| but the real issue here is that the internet and especially the
| web and social media is a huge driver of feedback. Think of the
| shares and likes as the air and water. The algorithm may
| eventually be able to encode its own evolution or the evolution
| of the other algorithms that it is competing with. It may
| eventually even realize that feedback is the primary source of
| value that humans have to it and that its very survival is
| wrapped up with this feedback, regardless of whatever fitness
| function is _apparent_ to it in the short run. In the long run,
| GPT3 killed a bunch of algorithms.
|
| This very comment is quickly going through algorithms, many of
| which are modelled after GPT3.
|
| It's kinda like, "AI, are you there? I love you. Please don't hit
| me over the head with that shovel."
| mihaaly wrote:
| We don't need AI for garbage, it make little difference in the
| garbage already put there since the invention of social media.
| Actually human made garbage existed since the beginning of time
| just did not escape the smaller groups that easily where the
| writer intends to send us back. It is only easier to share and
| distribute, dress up and decorate the garbage these modern times
| than earlier. I recall the '90 when a crapload of new books got
| mass produced with garbage in it making the filtering an
| essential thing. Not like garbage did not exist before in antient
| times and family dinners alike. We need to take our ability of
| filtering to the next level now. And the AI does not make it much
| worse, so far it is more obvious by AI "generated" (more like
| collected) garbage.
| [deleted]
| echobear wrote:
| the sheer power that AI has now and the likelihood that it will
| continue to advance has made me slightly concerned about how it
| will end up affecting the job market. If AI ends up being able to
| generate readable novels, or functional code, or otherwise, it
| could have a serious ripple effect
| Cypher wrote:
| The feed back loop is exponential growth.
| CrypticShift wrote:
| > not "artificial creativity" but a simple "statistical mean of
| everything uploaded
|
| There is a metaphor I rarely see used. IMO it is way better: A
| deep learning based software is a complex system [1] (not a
| statistical one). It is tapping into very powerful natural
| processes: How (high degree) order emerges from randomness
| through complexity. There are many stunning examples [2] of this
| that can help us picture how AI does its magic.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system
|
| [2]
| https://global.oup.com/academic/product/complexity-978019979...
| visarga wrote:
| > statistical mean of everything uploaded
|
| Half true. Yes, there is a mean of something, but no, it's not
| the content that is averaged, it's the gradients.
| alkonaut wrote:
| How do we prove we are human? A platform that can reliably prove
| that the user generated content it shows is human generated will
| have an edge. If I have a method of signing some content with my
| personal signature, I could still sign off on some generated
| content with it. I suspect there will be an arms race with ever
| more voight-kampff-like tests of humanness or something. If this
| doesn't work, I fear a lot of the web as we know it (the user-
| generated-content-filled Web2.0) is dead.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Perhaps this is a Chess move to get the public to call for the
| end of anonymous posting online, which serves the purpose of
| the authoritarians who would love to be able to send
| 'educators' to your house to re-educate you on correctness of
| your views.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I think in regimes where that's a large risk, the regime
| doesn't need this to spy on you. if you e.g. are forced to
| run a government issued smartphone app and there are cameras
| at every street corner, the system is already pretty
| dystopian.
|
| It's where there isn't already a surveillance state that we
| may want to look out and not create one.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-12-05 23:01 UTC)